Scraped site, hijacked searches for business name.
-
Hello, I have a site that was scraped (possibly by a competitor's seo company), who then built links to the duplicate site. When people do a search for the name of the business the scraped site is all that comes up along with the usual third-party sites. They seem to take the site down and put it back up every couple of weeks to maintain the rankings in Google. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this? Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated.
Search: LIC Dental Associates
Scraped site: old-farmshow.net
Legit site: licdentalassociates.com
Thanks,
Emery
-
This might be a problem. If you submit a DMCA agaist a page and that DMCA is rejected, Google will often not accept a second attempt. This seems to be a problem with Google's DMCA system.
Good luck.
-
If the site goes live again, take screenshots. It looks like the site is hosted by Continuum Data Centers. (http://www.whoishostingthis.com/?q=old-farmshow.net). You could contact them with the screenshots and an explanation as to what is going on and they may remove the site.
If that doesn't work, I'd probably get an attorney involved.
Good luck!
-
Thanks Marie, I'll give that a try.
Update: The DMCA was rejected due to the site 404'ing.
-
Weird.
I would think that if most times when Google visits this page they get a 404 error they would eventually drop it from the index.
Hopefully the DMCA will be successful.
In the meantime, have you tried rewriting the content on your home page? It may be that Google thinks your page is a canonical of the old-farmshow site and is treating it as an inferior site.
Usually Google is pretty good at figuring out what your brand name is, but your page only contains the phrase "LIC Dental Associates" in the title tag and then in the footer. I'd suggest adding a paragraph of content at the top of the page that has an H1 tag saying, "LIC Dental Associates" and then a paragraph that explains concisely what you offer. Be sure to put a few keywords in that paragraph, but don't keyword stuff it. Also mention the brand once or twice in the copy of the page as well.
I'd also change up the wording on the rest of the page significantly so that Google doesn't think it's a duplicate of the fake one.
Once you've done that, then I'd fetch and render using Google Search Console and submit the page to the index. I'm betting that will do the trick.
-
No, it has been a 404 whoever did this puts the site back up every couple of weeks and the rest of the time it's a 404. That's been the main frustration with this whole thing.
-
Looks like you succeeded! I'm seeing a 404 error when I click on the old-farmshow site.
-
Nice work! Hope it kills those weasels.
-
Thanks for the response. Our DCMA request is currently under review, I have also submitted complaints to the domain registrar along with submitting the SERP for removal through GSC since the site is currently down. So far everything is pending/under review and it's all moving at a snails pace...
-
If I owned copyright to the pages that they have scraped, I would use my Google DMCA Dashboard to file DMCA complaints against all of the pages on their site where my content is being used in violation of copyright.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard
If you are not familiar with DMCA it would be good to review your plans with an attorney before taking action. After consulting with an attorney we started filing DMCAs at scale against people who were using our content. The results have been positive.
If they are using Adsense, I would file complaints there too, and possibly with their hosting.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Homepage not ranking for branded searches after Google penalty removal
Hi all, A site I work on was hit with a manual action penalty some time ago for spammy links built by a former SEO agency. It was a partial match penalty so only affected some pages - most likely the homepage. We carried out a lot of work cleaning up links and disavowed suspicious links which we couldn't get removed. Again, most of these were to the homepage. The disavow file was uploaded to Google last Friday and our penalty was lifted this Tuesday. Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. I've carried out the obvious checks - robots.txt, making sure we're not accidentally noindexing the page or doing anything funky with canonicals etc and it's all good. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? I'm thinking Google simply needs time to catch up due to all the links we've disavowed and sitting tight is the best option but could do with some reassurance! Any past experiences or advice on what I might be missing would be great. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brendan-Jackson1 -
Whether to use new domain or old ecommerce site domain that has been incomplete for a long time.
Hello, We are starting a second store in our niche. Which of the following should I choose: A. We have a site from a year and a half ago that we put content on but never actually added products. The category and article content needs to be completely rewritten. We will completely rewrite the content to be much better and up to date. We're planning on adding products and rewriting the manufacturer descriptions. B. We could use a new domain that is closer to exact match for our main keyword. We'd just buy one for $15 I don't know whether A or B would be the fastest way to get the site going. I'm concerned that leaving a site half done for a year could cause an issue, but I really don't know. If you've got experience with this, please advise. Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Massive site-wide internal footer links to doorway pages: how bad is this?
My company has stuffed several hundred links into the footer of every page. Well, technically not the footer, as they're right at the end of the body tag, but basically the same thing. They are formatted as follows: [" href="http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm">" target="_blank">http://example.com/springfield_pa_real_estate.htm">](</span><a class= "http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm")springfield, pa real estate These direct to individual pages that contain the same few images and variations the following text that just replace the town and state: _Springfield, PA Real Estate - Springfield County [images] This page features links to help you Find Listings and Homes for sale in the Springfield area MLS, Springfield Real Estate Agents, and Springfield home values. Our free real estate services feature all Springfield and Springfield suburban areas. We also have information on Springfield home selling, Springfield home buying, financing and mortgages, insurance and other realty services for anyone looking to sell a home or buy a home in Springfield. And if you are relocating to Springfield or want Springfield relocation information we can help with our Relocation Network._ The bolded text links to our internal site pages for buying, selling, relocation, etc. Like I said, this is repeated several hundred times, on every single page on our site. In our XML sitemap file, there are links to: http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BD69
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Homes/
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Townhomes/ That direct to separate pages with a Google map result for properties for sale in Springfield. It's accompanied by the a boilerplate version of this: _Find Springfield Pennsylvania Real Estate for sale on www.example.com - your complete source for all Springfield Pennsylvania real estate. Using www.example.com, you can search the entire local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) for up to date Springfield Pennsylvania real estate for sale that may not be available elsewhere. This includes every Springfield Pennsylvania property that's currently for sale and listed on our local MLS. Example Company is a fully licensed Springfield Pennsylvania real estate provider._ Google Webmaster Tools is reporting that some of these pages have over 30,000 internal links on our site. However, GWT isn't reporting any manual actions that need to be addressed. How blatantly abusive and spammy is this? At best, Google doesn't care a spit about it , but worst case is this is actively harming our SERP rankings. What's the best way to go about dealing with this? The site did have Analytics running, but the company lost the account information years ago, otherwise I'd check the numbers to see if we were ever hit by Panda/Penguin. I just got a new Analytics account implemented 2 weeks ago. Of course it's still using deprecated object values so I don't even know how accurate it is. Thanks everyone! qrPftlf.png0 -
HELP - Site architecture of E-Commerce Mega Menu - Linkjuice flow
Hi everyone, I hope you have a couple of mins to give me your opinion. Ecommerce site has around 2000 products, in english and spanish, and around only 70 hits per day if that. We have done a lot of optimisation on the site - Page Titles, URL's, Content, H1's, etc.... Everything on page is pretty much under control, except I am starting to realise the site architecture could be harming our SEO efforts. Once someone arrives on site they are language detected and do a 302 to either domain.com/EN or domain.com/ES depending on their preferred language. Then on the homepage, we have the big MEGA MENU - and we have
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
CAT 1
SubCat 1
SubsubCat 1
SubsubCat 2
SubsubCat 3 Overall, there are 145 "categories". Plus links to some CMS pages, like Home, Delivery terms, etc... Each Main Category, contains the products of everything related to that category - so for example:
KITCHENWARE
COOKWARE BAKINWARE
SAUCEPANS BOWLS
FRYING PANS Kitchenware contains: ALL PRODUCTS OF SUBCATS BELOW, SO COOKWARE ITEMS, SAUCEPANS, FRYING PANS, BAKINGWARE, etc... plus links to those categories through breadcrumbs and a left hand nav in addition to the mega menu above. So once the bots hit the site, immediately they have this structure to deal with. Here is what stats look like:
Domain Authority: 18 www.domain.com/EN/
PA: 27
mR: 3.99
mT: 4.90 www.domain.com/EN/CAT 1
PA: 15
mR: 3.05
mT: 4.54 www.domain.com/EN/CAT 1/SUBCAT1
PA: 15
mR: 3.05
mT: 4.54 Product pages themselves - have a PA of 1 and no mR or mT. I really need some other opinions here - I am thinking of: Removing links in Nav menu so it only contains CAT1 and SUBCAT1 but DELETE SUBSUBCATS1 which represent around 80 links Remove products within the CAT1 page - eg., the CAT 1 would "tile" graphical links to subcategories, but not display products themselves. So products are only available right at the lowest part of the chain (which will be shortened) But I am willing to hear any other ideas please - maybe another alternative is to start building links to boost DA and linkjuice? Thanks all, Ben0 -
How to know if a link in a directory will be good for my site?
Hi! Some time ago, a friend of my added our site to a directory. I did not notice it until today, when in the search results for my domain name, the directory came in the first page, in the four position. My friend wrote a nice article, describing our bussiness, and the page has a doFollow link. Looking at the metrics of that directory, I found the following: Domain Authority: 70; main page authority: 76; linking domain roots: 1383; total links: 94663 (several anchor texts); facebook shares: 26; facebook likes: 14; tweets: 20; Google +1: 15. The directory accept a free article about a company, does not review it before it is published, but look for duplicated articles representing spam; so one company can only have one listing (in theory). Is there any formula to know if a directory is safe to publish a doFollow link? If they don't review the link I would say is not a good signal, but is there any other factors to take into account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | te_c0 -
Has anyone been able to recover a site from that was slapped by panda?
I have a client that the only thing I can determine is over optimization of a couple anchor terms which the person no longer ranks for..I tried mixing up with brandname , brandname.com and a diversity of links but nothing seems to budge anyone have a similar problem?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foreignhaus0 -
How much pain can I expect if I change the URL structure of the site again?
About 3 months ago I implemented a massive URL structure change by 'upgrading' some of the features of our CMS Prior to this URL's for catergorys and products looked something like this http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=OX09 I made a few changes but din't implement it fully as I felt it would be better to do it instages as the site was getting indexed more thouroughly. HOWEVER... We have just hit the first page for some key SERP's and I am wary to rock the boat again by changing the URL structures again and all the sitemaps. How much pain do you think we could feel if i went ahead and optimised the URL's fully? and What would you do? 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0