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A couple of years back I was talking to someone who did SEO for a popular education network. The company was spending millions of dollars every month on SEO an

by jeswin 8y ago

A couple of years back I was talking to someone who did SEO for a popular education network. The company was spending millions of dollars every month on SEO and advertising. Their module operandi went like this: 1. Offer money to license or buy a smaller competitor's content 2. If that doesn't work, crawl and clone the site 3. Pump a lot of money into Google Ads, so that the cloned site now appears as an ad above the legitimate site. Google makes such scam easier now by making the ads look like organic results - a non technical user would hardly notice. 4. The legitimate site just dies. I was asked to build a tool which crawls sites, which I refused. But I learned how professional SEO works.

graeme 8y ago
This is somewhat risky, no? It's a clear case of copyright theft, and would be trivial to sue unless they hit everything behind cutouts to the extent they weren't traceable. One would think the owner of the cloned site would notice lower traffic, search, and notice the ad scam. This strategy sounds like it would take months to execute before the competing site died, if not longer. Am I missing something? I've read lots of seo scams that seem very hard to undo. This one seems....slow, very avoidable, with large legal and reputational risks for the perpetrator.
- baddox 8y ago
  It’s never trivial to sue.
  - graeme 8y ago
    No, but in a case with a clear paper trail it wouldn't be hard to send a very clearly worded cease and desist showing exactly what damages are expected and how easy it is to prove. Depending on the size of the company would also be possible to raise a big PR fuss, get on top of Hacker News, etc. Plus there is DMCA takedown, google's tools, etc. Those are trivial to use.
iKevinShah 8y ago
This is on the same level (IMO) like when Site A pays SEO company to make SITE B appear as SPAM (usually by spamming SITE B's links on commenting systems with some vague texts). Had read this on discussion forums a lot when "Scrapebox" and the likes were used (2010-12ish)
stef25 8y ago
Sorry, calling BS on this one. By simply copying a site you get flagged as having duplicate content. Then there's DMCA. I've seen an e-commerce site's homepage get de-indexed, killing the business, due to 1 single image being used for which the site owner didn't have copyright. SEO undoubtedly has many shady practises, but "professional SEO" is actually really difficult and involves much more than cloning competitor sites and somehow getting away with it.
- jeswin 8y ago
  1. You don't do this (plagiarism) on your main site. 2. DMCA is a US law. It may or may not apply, depending on the company I referred to. Also, going to court depends on a lot of factors. 3. You don't necessarily need to clone verbatim. You could generate content automatically (or with manual help) targeting the same keywords, but based on parsed content. 4. This is not trying to be in organic search results. Promoted solely via ads. Sorry, my experience has been that a SEO and content generation (as it happens today in Google and FB) ranks high among shady and manipulative practices. Add: Of course, there are many good companies too.
- dorgo 8y ago
  "duplicate content" is a problem for both, the original site and the copycat. But the copycat doesn't rely on SEO in this example. It just buys traffic in AdWords. So the duplicate content penalty would harm only the original site.
  - stef25 8y ago
    Google must surely be able to tell the difference between the original site and copying site because of timestamps. How would an Adwords campaign change that?
    - dorgo 8y ago
      Maybe Google can tell the difference, but, as I did SEO some years ago, we didn't relyed on it. Duplicate content was considered a problem regardless of who published first. Duplicate content is a problem for organic rankings. In payed search it may be a problem for the quality factor (not sure). But even if it impacts the quality factor you just have to pay more to achieve the same result.

by jeswin 8y ago

graeme 8y ago

This is somewhat risky, no? It's a clear case of copyright theft, and would be trivial to sue unless they hit everything behind cutouts to the extent they weren't traceable. One would think the owner of the cloned site would notice lower traffic, search, and notice the ad scam. This strategy sounds like it would take months to execute before the competing site died, if not longer. Am I missing something? I've read lots of seo scams that seem very hard to undo. This one seems....slow, very avoidable, with large legal and reputational risks for the perpetrator.

baddox 8y ago
It’s never trivial to sue.
- graeme 8y ago
  No, but in a case with a clear paper trail it wouldn't be hard to send a very clearly worded cease and desist showing exactly what damages are expected and how easy it is to prove. Depending on the size of the company would also be possible to raise a big PR fuss, get on top of Hacker News, etc. Plus there is DMCA takedown, google's tools, etc. Those are trivial to use.

iKevinShah 8y ago

This is on the same level (IMO) like when Site A pays SEO company to make SITE B appear as SPAM (usually by spamming SITE B's links on commenting systems with some vague texts). Had read this on discussion forums a lot when "Scrapebox" and the likes were used (2010-12ish)

stef25 8y ago

Sorry, calling BS on this one. By simply copying a site you get flagged as having duplicate content. Then there's DMCA. I've seen an e-commerce site's homepage get de-indexed, killing the business, due to 1 single image being used for which the site owner didn't have copyright. SEO undoubtedly has many shady practises, but "professional SEO" is actually really difficult and involves much more than cloning competitor sites and somehow getting away with it.

jeswin 8y ago
1. You don't do this (plagiarism) on your main site. 2. DMCA is a US law. It may or may not apply, depending on the company I referred to. Also, going to court depends on a lot of factors. 3. You don't necessarily need to clone verbatim. You could generate content automatically (or with manual help) targeting the same keywords, but based on parsed content. 4. This is not trying to be in organic search results. Promoted solely via ads. Sorry, my experience has been that a SEO and content generation (as it happens today in Google and FB) ranks high among shady and manipulative practices. Add: Of course, there are many good companies too.
dorgo 8y ago
"duplicate content" is a problem for both, the original site and the copycat. But the copycat doesn't rely on SEO in this example. It just buys traffic in AdWords. So the duplicate content penalty would harm only the original site.
- stef25 8y ago
  Google must surely be able to tell the difference between the original site and copying site because of timestamps. How would an Adwords campaign change that?
  - dorgo 8y ago
    Maybe Google can tell the difference, but, as I did SEO some years ago, we didn't relyed on it. Duplicate content was considered a problem regardless of who published first. Duplicate content is a problem for organic rankings. In payed search it may be a problem for the quality factor (not sure). But even if it impacts the quality factor you just have to pay more to achieve the same result.