I was pretty hot when I wrote that. I, like everyone else here who is immersed in this mess get rather upset when other people directly impact my livelihood. So what else can we do here, they are not going to stop this unless they have fear of something. Whether it be an affiliate program dropping them indefinitely, or some other ideas I have, fear has got to become a part of this equation somewhere or they will never ever stop.
Until this big mess, I was under the assumption that it was a myth how blackhatters can hurt your serps. And it is extremely disheartning to learn that all of our hard work can easily be negated by just a few blackhatters who have it in for us.
All efforts to continue to grow my business almost seem futile at this point, as I don’t have the trust factor, and because these blackhatters know how to get me penalized or whatever it is they do to hurt me, then obviously google makes me guilty by association by dropping half of my site.
I have been submitting the spammer sites to google as suggested by Dom, for not just mine but other webmasters who have been affected. But I am unclear as to what other measures I can take to protect my site. Janet had mentioned that we should protect our content from crawlers that may steal it. How can we do that?
It would really be nice if anyone could summarize any other measures we can take to protect ourselves from these thieves.