
What the SEO? – The shady world of small business SEO - dangoldin
http://dangoldin.com/2013/10/20/what-the-seo/
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Matt_Cutts
Hey Dan, it's annoying when a someone scrapes your website, and it's even more
annoying that this site tried to claim your Mom's images with Getty. But as
far as I can tell, the site that you mentioned isn't having any success at
all. For all the work that this spammer put into copying your Mom's site, it
doesn't look like they're getting even a single digit number of visitors from
Google. So they may be annoying, but their attempts at spamming didn't do them
any good at all.

Feel free to do a DMCA request, but I'm already passing this to my team as a
spam report and we'll dig into it. I don't know how Getty deals with scrapers
though, so you'll need to look into that on your side.

I made a video with advice about dealing with scraping a few years ago that
might be useful for you:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CosWAVLCZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CosWAVLCZg)

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dangoldin
Matt,

Thanks for the response - I guess my mom's site is good enough to ward off a
cheap attack. Thanks for passing this on to the team - that host has a ton
more sites similar to my mom's so anything that can be done to help the
original owners would be awesome. It sucks worse for people who aren't
familiar with the web and just have to deal with the consequences of someone
else's actions. Anything Google can do to help is appreciated and I suspect
this problem will only get more difficult.

I'll past that video on to my mom as well. Thanks again.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
No worries at all. It was a pretty big network of spam domains, even though
each individual domain wasn't really having any impact.

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Matsta
Ok, this guy is using a couple of methods off BlackHatWorld (Probably the
biggest SEO forum around if you haven't heard of it)

So essentially this guy is building this site, ranking it in Google using the
churn 'n Burn method, then once its ranking well he'll contact local business
saying he can link to them in return for a fee.

Even though the domain is 6 months old, if you look at ahrefs this guy has 33k
backlinks to the homepage. Google had a major SEO update on October 4th which
essentially fucked up their algorithm more than it already was. This churn 'n
burn method means that you spam out a zillion backlinks and you will rank
really well until the next Google update comes along (which is around 3-4
months) You could do this in the previous Google update (Penguin 2.1) and I
thought Google would fix this but they just made it easier. This is a good
example of the method: [http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-
seo/5769...](http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-
seo/576969-payday-loans-matt-cutts.html) (This was the one of the guys that
essentially figured out this method from what I can tell)

So with this new Google update, they are getting rid of some of the spammy
sites, but more spam sites just taken their places in the rankings. Now they
are focusing on the amount of content on your site rather than the backlinks.
So now 10 year old sites with hundreds of legitimate, high authority backlinks
are getting outranked but spammy sites with 14 backlinks and 300 gibberish
articles.

I've also been reading that with local Google searches, you get results from
completely different countries. For example, people in the UK were reporting
that they were getting results from sites in Russia, Argentina and New Zealand
instead of UK results. I don't think this happens as much in America from what
I know.

So I'm guessing Google is eventually going to iron out these problems, but
it's a battleground at the moment.

If you do get outranked by this guy, make a video with your keywords in the
title, same with a Facebook and LinkedIn page and then buy a bunch of
backlinks off Fiverr. They should outrank pretty much any other website in a
matter of days.

~~~
alexweber
Great post.

I'm going to take this opportunity to suggest people check out Duck Duck Go.
That is all.

~~~
yen223
What does Duck Duck Go do to mitigate this sort of SEO attacks?

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dragonbonheur
A DCMA Takedown notice is the best legal way to take down the website. If you
want to get shady too you could also use tactics like using automated black
hat tools and generate lots of suspicious (to google)backlinks pointing to
www.bestnewjerseyartsschool.com Far from helping them, it will tell google
that they aren't worth ranking that high. Of course, it's a last resort.
Copying content and duplicating it all over the web is a form of SEO attack.
Now you just have to fight back.

Of course, it would still be worth it to get your own content rewritten at
least once before you hit them back.

I know people won't agree with this radical solution but for those black hat
guys the web is a war zone. Good luck.

~~~
dangoldin
Thanks. I'm helping my mom file it.

Turns out that they actually filed a DMCA request against my mom's site for
the photos she took. That's some chutzpah.

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thekevan
"If you want to get shady too you could also use tactics like using automated
black hat tools and generate lots of suspicious (to google)backlinks pointing
to www.bestnewjerseyartsschool.com Far from helping them, it will tell google
that they aren't worth ranking that high."

I'd do some research before embarking on this. Remember, they copied your
mom's website, they have duplicate content. I wouldn't be surprised if
Google's crawler already knows that. So if you make their site look shady,
your mom's site may be hurt in SEO rankings for being guilty by association.
Ironic, I know. Again, I am not sure if this could be the case, but you may
want to get an expert's opinion.

~~~
dragonbonheur
That is precisely why I wrote it would be worthwhile to have existing content
rewritten before striking back. Just in case.

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birken
Are you actually losing any queries to this site or seeing a drop in your
traffic? Google is very smart, they probably know your site is more
trustworthy and had the content first. If the person is hosting a bunch of
similarly crappy pages on the same IP and/or the same host, Google knows about
it.

Any suitably popular site is going to have all sorts of people ripping off
your content. Google knows this, and work very hard to deal with it. I just
searched for a bunch of things related to your site and the legitimate pages
appears to be winning them all, and I don't even see the bad page showing up
in the top 10.

If the site is sapping traffic, file a DCMA against their hosting provider
(though there are some shady web-hosts who won't do anything about it).
Obviously if they are filing a DCMA request against you, defend yourself. But
just because somebody is ripping off your content doesn't necessarily mean you
need to do anything.

~~~
dangoldin
Based on the Google analytics the traffic's steady but who's to say that this
won't happen in the future? I think the fact that this behavior is allowed to
happen is the problem. Even if this adversely affects one real business it
should be fixed.

To note - my mom found out about this site when she received a note telling
her she needs to pay close to a $1000 to license the photo that was ripped off
from her site. Otherwise she wouldn't even have found out about this.

~~~
gingerlime
> To note - my mom found out about this site when she received a note telling
> her she needs to pay close to a $1000 to license the photo that was ripped
> off from her site.

To me this is smells like the real motive behind this. It's not about trashing
your SEO, or stealing traffic, but rather to scare those small website owners
into paying some kind of 'fee'.

It's pretty safe to assume lots of small websites for local businesses use
various photos they found online or downloaded from Google images, rather than
their own content or images they bothered paying license for. Copying those
images onto a seemingly legitimate site and then filing a claim for license
payment seems like a pretty good strategy to milk money out of innocent site
owners.

I'd be curious to see the note your mum received and what kind of language or
tactics it's using.

~~~
dangoldin
So I just dove into it and that notice was actually from Getty images which
claimed she was using an unlicensed photo. When she asked which photo they
replied with a photo from the rip-off site which she has no control over.
Getty is actually responding correctly in this case but falsely targeting my
mom since they assume it's her site. Now if only they can issue a DMCA notice
to that other site..

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memracom
Help your Mom refresh her site content completely. Rewrite everything and
reorganize it in a fresh new way. Make sure that you include some duplicate
links for the same pages and do proper canonicalization to indicate to Google
which is the authoritative link.
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en)

In the process of rewriting, change some of the key URLs, i.e. some of the
pages that link to a lot of other pages on your site, and submit those changes
to Google for recrawling
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/submit-...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/submit-
urls-to-google-with-fetch-as.html)

This will help defeat a copycat who has munged up their timestamps because
Google will now believe that your mom's site is the original.

Don't rewrite too much, i.e. no need to change every word, but just try to
improve every page, make it a bit clearer, restructure the content to put the
most important info first using journalistic pyramid style writing. Change
some of the wording in headings and titles. Never make a change just for
change's sake, but always make changes when they improve the content, and help
the target audience for that page. You could even test a few pages on actual
target audience members and ask them if they think the rewrite is better and
clearer.

Once you go through all of this, keep up the resubmissions to Google when key
pages change, for instance the site map, index pages, portal pages, and so on.

They will no doubt copy your site again, but it will do them no good.

P.S. if you want to try an underhanded attack on the people doing this, don't
go to a blackhat link spam site. Instead contact the site owners of all the
real sites, and offer to help them for free, in making their site copy-proof.
If you find anyone who actually paid money, urge them to report the fraud to
police. Keep hunting for the people behind this, and when you find them, send
a copy of all the official fraud complaints from all over the country to their
local police department. That way you keep the moral high ground.

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ahhelp
What if for whatever reason your website goes down for a bit.... you go on
holiday not realizing because everyone needs a holiday for a couple weeks..
come back oh no.. will the scrapers now take your place as the originals? That
is the question.

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AznHisoka
Not trying to be snarky, but what happened to "Don't write for search engines,
just worry about the human visitor". Sure Google might get confused but I
doubt your regular visitors will confuse that spam site with yours..

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dangoldin
Well if people are searching for piano lessons and end up on that site instead
of my mom's they might just give up rather than try to find the real site
since they most likely will assume that's the site itself. Google's
responsible for helping the human visitors get to where they need to go.

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triplesec
take your link to the fake site down from your page here! You're just
upranking them and giving them potential traffic by giving them in-links.

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dangoldin
Yea - I have the rel="nofollow". Do you know if that's enough? Obviously I
don't want to give them any extra juice.

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300bps
You're probably OK but I wouldn't link them at all. Anyone who pretends to
know the secret sauce of Google or any other search engine is either lying or
is a high-level engineer working specifically on search at said search engine.

~~~
triplesec
just what he said. Most blogs on controversies deliberately don't link to the
bad guys' site (you can always google them, right?) just so as not to give
them traffic or any likely benefit.

~~~
dangoldin
I removed the links but kept the text. I want to make it easy for people to
compare the two without actually giving them the benefit. Surprisingly
difficult.

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ivanbrussik
the title tag of this is misleading - this is some sort of scammer, not a
"small business SEO company."

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coin
-1 for being mobile hostile by disabling pinchzoom. What value could there possibly be in disabling pinchzoom?

~~~
dangoldin
Hmm. That was not the intent. Let me take a look and see if I can fix the css.

Thanks for letting me know.

