

Competitor Attempts to Steal Product Descriptions.. Gets RickRoll'd - mkull

So today I noticed an interesting referer while tailing my ecommerce website's production.log file<p>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)<p>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
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pg
We used to redirect competitors (based on their ip addresses) to their own
sites when they tried to log into our software.

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engtech
Why not use some free library to thesaurasize your product DB and then collect
on those mechanical turk payouts yourself?

Bankrupt them. :)

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noodle
you 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.

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jakewolf
For $0.76 they're also overpaying for the HIT.

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marc_fawzi
Those who live by the gun, die by the gun.

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inovica
What 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

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enonko
Next 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...

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nilobject
Who cares? It's fun.

Same with pranks at the office. Total waste of time, but huge morale boosters.

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glasner
I'd make sure it's not one of your affiliates.

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mkull
Thats 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.

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copenja
I love this.

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PhillyEmpire
Ha! Served.

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softbuilder
They need to get vunk'd or if you're extra mean throw some 2G,1C their way.

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apathy
meatspin.com

Always good for laffs when the boss walks by

