HELP! How do I stop scraper sites - is there any recourse?

[YairSpolter]

Our site has lots of unique content and photos and it is constantly being scraped and posted on other websites. Most of these are no-name sites that pop up and exist for adwords revenue.

Aside from the fact that we don't want our content being copied, this is an SEO nightmare because they often link back to us from pages that are stuffed with keywords and have very low domain authority (it's a form of negative SEO).

My question is:

Does anyone have experience with fighting this phenonmenon?

What have you done that is effective?

Does anyone have experience with a service such as http://www.dmca.com/ProtectionPro.aspx ? Does it work/is it worth it?

Any input is appreciated!

[Alick300]

Hi ,

First let Google know about this by using this form @ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6bp1SOVmy60QjkF0Y/viewform

Second I would like to tell you that its myth that scrapers will hurt your Site. Scrapers don’t help or hurt you. Do you think that a little blog in Asia with no original writing and no visitors confuses Google? No. It just isn’t relevant.

To know more on this please visit below URL

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/

Thanks

[YairSpolter]

Thanks for the reassuring response, Alick.

Based on what you're saying (and that post from Niel Patel) it's a waste of time to even fill out Google form (these sites are not outranking us). Agree?

[Alick300]

Yes agreed but if you are seeing that scrapers sites outrank your sites in SERPs in that case you should fill the form.

Thanks

[kwoolf]

First thing to do is insert authorship markup and check that google recognizes you as an author of the site you're posting to. There is something to say for original content, and Google knows. If your content goes up first and is indexed first by Google, chance are you're going to rank better than the scrapper sites.

If these sites really bother you, you can submit a Copyright Removal form here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice, but a legal order to remove the content would be better (acted upon faster). Filing copyright infringement reports for eBay listings was very effective for me, but my experience with Google is limited. Let us know if you do file and how the process goes.

Generally speaking, it's actually pretty good that site are linking to your posts. If you are extremely uncomfortable with any particular site's backlink(s), you can use the GWT Disavow tool https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487/?hl=en&authuser=1

Good luck, and let us know what you do.

[kwoolf]

Two schools on that one. They may not be hurting your business now, so you can forget about them. That's only until you can't. If they continue rip off your work, they may take from you in the future--ad revenue, traffic stats, e-commerce, news reports, whatever you're doing--that's all money. If I had time to fill out the form, I'd do it.

[Beckistar]

Kevin has a really good point here. You need to input markup that tells Google that the content is yours. I find that adding self-referential canonical tags can help with this. Just be careful to input them correctly.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I agree with everything besides for the authorship markup bit.  Authorship markup is not being tracked by Google anymore - see http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975.

That said, the larger point about being the first content to go up is a good one.  If we can all figure out where the original is from, assume that Google can too.

[kwoolf]

Nice link Mark. News to me, really. But the fact that Schema.org and HTML5 both have author identification methods shows that it may be used by other search engines and/or services. And the followup article to your link there is "Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not." http://searchengineland.com/google-authorship-dead-author-rank-202254

But darn, man! All that time wasted getting authorship to work back then. Google's authorship verification process was indeed grueling.