5 ms·

What should you do when another site copies your content like this then?

by TrueGeek 4y ago

gkbrk 4y ago
You send a DMCA.
- pungentcomment 4y ago
  Chances are that the site will be hosted outside the US and the DMCA is a US only copyright law afaik. I don't think it's applicable outside the US.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    In those cases, you can send one to DDG and Bing, which are in the US. It won’t affect the actual website or other search engines, but it’s better than nothing.
    - bkirkby 4y ago
      Ianal, but I think ddg could come back and claim that their service doesn't copy the content or that their abstract is fair use, so a dmca wouldn't apply to them. If that happens I'd use language about the exclusive "public display" right that you have over your work. I'm not aware of this claim being used for a dmca, but I'd like to see how such a claim turned out.
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        IANAL either, but the DMCA has been used (by the RIAA, MPAA, and friends) to takedown pirate content on Google. I’d assume the same arguments would apply here. It can’t hurt to try.
        yrro 4y ago
        Linking to a site that infringes copyrights may make the linker liable on the grounds that they are committing contributory copyright infringement. It's cheaper for search engines to delist sites than fight that battle--particularly if their corporate masters also rely on licensing media for distribution themselves.
        elwebmaster 4y ago
        IANAL but could this be what the spam site has done to get OP delisted?
    - emurlin 4y ago
      Indeed you can. I've had similar issues before (a site scraping content, though apparently from dev.to instead of my own domain and a YouTube channel making a 'video' with text and TTS from a post). In the first case, I sent a DMCA to Google & Bing as well as to Cloudflare. Cloudflare responds by giving the name of the actual host, and I sent another DMCA to that host (they were US based, otherwise YMMV). The content was delisted (not the site, even though it was made up entirely of verbatim scraped content) from search engines and from the site. Bottom line is you can send a DMCA notice to search engines and it appears to be effective. Actually, in case search engines demote sites like this in some way, I would send the DMCA notice to search engines _first_, because if the content gets removed from the original site they may not be able to verify the duplicate content.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
O1111OOO 4y ago
> What should you do when another site copies your content like this then? Have we gotten to the point where websites (and their content) need to be verified like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok do for personal accounts? If so, will search engines be the ones verifying - using this as a new revenue scheme (with the dangers inherent in this... ie; pay to be listed or ranked higher)?
- edgyquant 4y ago
  No we’ve gotten to the point where Bing and DDG need disrupted. The answer is that these companies are ruining things not that DNS and simple search is wrong
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    I’ve moved from DDG to Kagi.com. It’s paid, but no ads and no incentives to remove legit sites that I’ve seen.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      I have as well and have gotten at least one coworker to do the same.
- lapcat 4y ago
  I actually did add a Bing authentication XML file to my site, but Bing deindexed me again anyway. Bing is the problem. It's broken.
  - linmob 4y ago
    Can confirm, authentication files don't help. Bing is seriously broken, and their support is all but helpful. This is an excerpt from one of their replies: > "Thank you for your patience during our investigation. After further review, it appears that your site did not meet the standards set by Bing to remain indexed the last time it was crawled. To ensure that this was not a false flag, I also escalated the issue to our Product Team and they manually reviewed your site and confirmed that it is in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines detailed here: https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30f.... We are not able to provide specifics for these types of issues but we recommend that you review our Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results." Before snarking, please check that link and the long lists of things - I did not find to find my website https://linmob.net https://linmob.net to be offending their "things to avoid list". That was a reply to my first ticket requesting re-indexation, later tickets only got what I would call "non-replies".
crazygringo 4y ago
Various things from addressing the problem directly if possible (block the IP address range they use to scrape your content with, insert JavaScript to strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from), to changing their search engine behavior (canonical meta tags, contact the search engine to let them know, build up links on the web to make your site higher ranked). The more sophisticated and popular the copycat site is (scraping from a distributed network, stripping most HTML tags, etc.), the harder it becomes, and the only thing is to contact the search and hope they can manually mark your domain as the authoritative one. Your success may vary according to your popularity/importance.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  > strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from That would almost certainly be regarded as a "doorway page"[1], resulting in you getting manually ranked downward or even deindexed entirely. [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?hl=en&visit_id=638094127408094327-1667863097&rd=1#doorways https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    You may have misunderstood, it doesn't have anything to do with doorway pages which are about presenting extra highly redundant content. I'm talking about, if content on legitimatesite.com includes JavaScript that detects if it's being loaded on any other domain, then erase the entire article's HTML from the DOM. Obviously this is easily defeated by stripping out JavaScript, so it's useful only for very primitive mirroring.
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      Hmmm, yeah "doorway page" probably wasn't the term I was looking for. However, that would almost definitely be regarded as some sort of spam or SEO tactic by crawlers and lead to further penalizations, which was my point.
StreamBright 4y ago
This is exactly a perfect use case for a blockchain. In fact if people are interested we should create a POC.

What should you do when another site copies your content like this then?

gkbrk 4y ago

You send a DMCA.

pungentcomment 4y ago
Chances are that the site will be hosted outside the US and the DMCA is a US only copyright law afaik. I don't think it's applicable outside the US.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  In those cases, you can send one to DDG and Bing, which are in the US. It won’t affect the actual website or other search engines, but it’s better than nothing.
  - bkirkby 4y ago
    Ianal, but I think ddg could come back and claim that their service doesn't copy the content or that their abstract is fair use, so a dmca wouldn't apply to them. If that happens I'd use language about the exclusive "public display" right that you have over your work. I'm not aware of this claim being used for a dmca, but I'd like to see how such a claim turned out.
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      IANAL either, but the DMCA has been used (by the RIAA, MPAA, and friends) to takedown pirate content on Google. I’d assume the same arguments would apply here. It can’t hurt to try.
      - yrro 4y ago
        Linking to a site that infringes copyrights may make the linker liable on the grounds that they are committing contributory copyright infringement. It's cheaper for search engines to delist sites than fight that battle--particularly if their corporate masters also rely on licensing media for distribution themselves.
        elwebmaster 4y ago
        IANAL but could this be what the spam site has done to get OP delisted?
  - emurlin 4y ago
    Indeed you can. I've had similar issues before (a site scraping content, though apparently from dev.to instead of my own domain and a YouTube channel making a 'video' with text and TTS from a post). In the first case, I sent a DMCA to Google & Bing as well as to Cloudflare. Cloudflare responds by giving the name of the actual host, and I sent another DMCA to that host (they were US based, otherwise YMMV). The content was delisted (not the site, even though it was made up entirely of verbatim scraped content) from search engines and from the site. Bottom line is you can send a DMCA notice to search engines and it appears to be effective. Actually, in case search engines demote sites like this in some way, I would send the DMCA notice to search engines _first_, because if the content gets removed from the original site they may not be able to verify the duplicate content.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

O1111OOO 4y ago

> What should you do when another site copies your content like this then? Have we gotten to the point where websites (and their content) need to be verified like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok do for personal accounts? If so, will search engines be the ones verifying - using this as a new revenue scheme (with the dangers inherent in this... ie; pay to be listed or ranked higher)?

edgyquant 4y ago
No we’ve gotten to the point where Bing and DDG need disrupted. The answer is that these companies are ruining things not that DNS and simple search is wrong
- thewebcount 4y ago
  I’ve moved from DDG to Kagi.com. It’s paid, but no ads and no incentives to remove legit sites that I’ve seen.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    I have as well and have gotten at least one coworker to do the same.
lapcat 4y ago
I actually did add a Bing authentication XML file to my site, but Bing deindexed me again anyway. Bing is the problem. It's broken.
- linmob 4y ago
  Can confirm, authentication files don't help. Bing is seriously broken, and their support is all but helpful. This is an excerpt from one of their replies: > "Thank you for your patience during our investigation. After further review, it appears that your site did not meet the standards set by Bing to remain indexed the last time it was crawled. To ensure that this was not a false flag, I also escalated the issue to our Product Team and they manually reviewed your site and confirmed that it is in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines detailed here: https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30f.... We are not able to provide specifics for these types of issues but we recommend that you review our Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results." Before snarking, please check that link and the long lists of things - I did not find to find my website https://linmob.net https://linmob.net to be offending their "things to avoid list". That was a reply to my first ticket requesting re-indexation, later tickets only got what I would call "non-replies".

crazygringo 4y ago

Various things from addressing the problem directly if possible (block the IP address range they use to scrape your content with, insert JavaScript to strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from), to changing their search engine behavior (canonical meta tags, contact the search engine to let them know, build up links on the web to make your site higher ranked). The more sophisticated and popular the copycat site is (scraping from a distributed network, stripping most HTML tags, etc.), the harder it becomes, and the only thing is to contact the search and hope they can manually mark your domain as the authoritative one. Your success may vary according to your popularity/importance.

EarlKing 4y ago
> strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from That would almost certainly be regarded as a "doorway page"[1], resulting in you getting manually ranked downward or even deindexed entirely. [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?hl=en&visit_id=638094127408094327-1667863097&rd=1#doorways https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
- crazygringo 4y ago
  You may have misunderstood, it doesn't have anything to do with doorway pages which are about presenting extra highly redundant content. I'm talking about, if content on legitimatesite.com includes JavaScript that detects if it's being loaded on any other domain, then erase the entire article's HTML from the DOM. Obviously this is easily defeated by stripping out JavaScript, so it's useful only for very primitive mirroring.
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    Hmmm, yeah "doorway page" probably wasn't the term I was looking for. However, that would almost definitely be regarded as some sort of spam or SEO tactic by crawlers and lead to further penalizations, which was my point.

StreamBright 4y ago

This is exactly a perfect use case for a blockchain. In fact if people are interested we should create a POC.