Suggestions on Handling Copycat Spammer

[Anti-Alex]

Hello,

We're looking for suggestions on how to handle a copy cat spammer. Another website (therichest.org) has been directly coping our posts and re-writing them just enough to fly under the Google radar. They end up outranking us and we've optimized, hired seo consultants, and run every test/review possible and everyone agrees that we should outrank them at the end of the day. However, that's not the case. Here's an example:

Google: nicole porche net worth

therichest.org ranks 1st. The webmaster is waiting for us to post and the moment we throw up a post, they copy the post.

Our link is: http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/models/nicole-porche-net-worth/

It would be ok if we were able to get a clear idea on why they outrank us but no one is able to give us a clear answer on why. They're also using some kind of strange redirect system with these domains:

http://celebrity-salary.com/

http://celebritysalary.org/

http://www.therichest.org/celebnetworth/

http://www.richestcelebrity.com/

http://www.celebrity-networth.com/

http://celebritynetworth.org

We also noticed that their FB likes sit high in the 3-5k Likes range which doesn't make sense when their FB groups have less than 100 followers.

*mini update after talking to my partner - we'd like to offer a $500 bounty for the best response. It'll be for anyone that can help us try and identify any black hat techniques they're using, and offer some white hat suggestions for us to optimize ahead.

[MrFrisbee]

Have you tried using http://www.copyscape.com/ to see whether it thinks that the copy is in fact being copied?

It will give a score on how similar the copy is and if there are "repeat" incidents of this happening from your site to theirs (and you can prove you were the originator of the copy), then you may have a bit more ammunition to fight them with.

Also, if there is enough evidence, then their web host are worth contact as the site will be breaching the terms and conditions of their host and you can make some sort of complaint to the host too.

Just to prove the issue, can you put up a totally fake story that is unique to your site only (in the topic/fact way). Then, if it just appears on their site but not elsewhere you may also have a stronger case.

Looking at your example above, you appear to have a bigger problem with this site http://www.getnetworth.com/nicole-porche-net-worth/ which is copying you word for word on this article at least.

Charles.

[Dr-Pete]

Do you have any notion of whether their posts are getting indexed faster than yours? Even if they re-post your content, they could get indexed first if they seem to have more authority. You can ping certain services before you roll out to your RSS feed, for example. This post at BlueGlass talks about it:

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/content-scraping-prevention-benefits/

There is always the legal route, include DMCA takedowns. At some point, unfortunately, it may come down to that. If it's just one site (and not 100s), that's more feasible.

[kbloemendaal]

I noticed that too on second look.

[TakeshiYoung]

Good point, did not notice that.

[Adam.Whittles]

Am I missing something here because it looks like they already are using Wordpress when I look at the html. Also the code looks a mess because they have minified it, nothing wrong with doing that. It helps keep the file size down which Google likes!

[Anti-Alex]

Thanks for the responses. We understand that they are flying just enough below the radar to get away with it and at the end of the day, news is just information.

What we'd like to do is identify any black hat techniques they're using. Then we'd like some suggestions on some white hat techniques that we can implement to try to rank ahead.

I spoke to my partner and we understand this is a lot of work. We've decided to offer $500 to the best response. We're not looking for a full audit, just suggestions and information that anyone is willing to share

Thanks again to everyone that already jumped in with speedy responses.

[SEODinosaur]

They have probably used a service like fiverr to gain the users... You can buy 5,000 likes for 5 bucks... Don't worry man, sites like these never make it long. They will lose the race I would bet anything on it.

[SEODinosaur]

Well if its not duplicate you can not report them. I use resources all the time to create content. We have to learn from somewhere, right?

[TakeshiYoung]

Yeah, definitely consider looking at a different CMS (Wordpress is great), because the code on your site is a mess.

[TakeshiYoung]

Good suggestions.  Also, consider submitting your new content to a couple social bookmarking sites.  They're not the highest quality backlinks, but at least you'll get some external links coming into your new content.

[kbloemendaal]

Funny thing is, this forum post shows up as #10 on Google for that search already....

A couple of things I would consider:

Move one of the ads above the fold. 3 ads above the fold is too much (and that is on my MacBook Pro 13"), and Google has been known to frown on it lately.

Consider changing to Wordpress, their site is on it and if you notice some of those pages ranking above yours are category pages. One thing most people don't realize with Wordpress is the SEO benefit of the category and tag pages that are literally automatically created for you as your site grows. IE: One article on a topic can easily become several using categories and tags.

[crazyjayd]

I had this happen to a celeb site I ran back when panda hit. 1. seed your posts to talk about you. 2. Test how long they take to scrap, maybe using trash content, then update with the newer real content. 3. DCMA them, report copyright violations to their hosts and adsense if they are using them.

I got one guy thrown out of google, I got another one's adsense terminated.

It will be a bit of work on your part. Good luck,

Jay

[TakeshiYoung]

Yeah, problem is they are re-writing the content, so it's not duplicate content.

[SEODinosaur]

Same thing happend to me. A site was stealing our content and not tracking back, they were also erasing our links... Contact google they will contact the website for you. If the site does not remove the duplicate content they will be de-indexed : ) When I complained Google contacted them and they removed all the duplications.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1

Hope this helps.

[TakeshiYoung]

That does sound very frustrating, although you can't copyright facts, so there's nothing illegal going on.

How many keywords are they outranking you on?  It looks like they are targeting fewer keywords than you are on their homepage, so maybe they are outranking you for just those?

Not sure what's going on with the domains, although it's hard to imagine that's helping them as the other domains don't have any link juice (except for celebritynetworth.org, which is a straight redirect).

FB likes are easy to buy, you can get thousands of them on sites like fiverr.com.  They're probably just using them for fake social proof.