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Competitor Attempts to Steal Product Descriptions.. Gets RickRoll'd
So today I noticed an interesting referer while tailing my ecommerce website's production.log file
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=ZXN2S645SXNTG6SRHV5Z
(Notice the link at the top of the page links to revzilla.com (my site), sometimes it swaps to an amazon.com product so just refresh that page if it does)
Apparently someone had created a mechanical turk which is paying people to reword / paraphrase our product descriptions (I assume) for use on their competing website. We can't be having that so I added a simple rule to redirect any Mechanical Turk referrers to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU :D
- softbuilder 19y agoThey need to get vunk'd or if you're extra mean throw some 2G,1C their way.
- apathy 19y agomeatspin.com Always good for laffs when the boss walks by
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- PhillyEmpire 19y ago2G, 1C = game over. That's what I would have done.
- PhillyEmpire 19y agoHa! Served.
- jakewolf 19y agoFor $0.76 they're also overpaying for the HIT.
- pg 19y agoWe used to redirect competitors (based on their ip addresses) to their own sites when they tried to log into our software.
- enonko 19y agoNext time they will not link directly to you but redirect through something. Or simply copy-and-paste your content into the job description. It's a waste of time trying to fight this...
- nilobject 19y agoWho cares? It's fun. Same with pranks at the office. Total waste of time, but huge morale boosters.
- jcl 19y agoIt might have been more effective to redirect them to a randomly chosen product description from a set of, say, fifty. They'd likely have wasted a lot of Turk time rewording those fifty descriptions before realizing what was going on.
- marc_fawzi 19y agoThose who live by the gun, die by the gun.
- troppo 19y agoIn before proxy.
- inovica 19y agoWhat is the affect of this on your Google ranking? Just curious as to how much of your content they are altering. If not much then could it cause your site to be ranked lower due to duplicated content? Just curious on this. I think there are tools that will look for plagarised content online
- engtech 19y agoWhy not use some free library to thesaurasize your product DB and then collect on those mechanical turk payouts yourself? Bankrupt them. :)
- noodle 19y agoyou should've forced them to redirect always to the same product, if they were directly linking to products from the turk. that way, the person paying would be getting hundreds of one product description.
- copenja 19y agoI love this.
- glasner 19y agoI'd make sure it's not one of your affiliates.
- mkull 19y agoThats a good point and I actually did look into that a bit ago. Not one of our affiliates at least, but maybe one of the competitor's.