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Janet
I must say a well thought through post, and also unfortunately a typical Blackhat approach to abuse the fact that the young industry with it’s very limited legal protection can do very little to protect themselves from people with a different morality than ours. Having read many of your SEO posts in the past and knowing how brilliant you are, I can’t help but to respect you for your SEO genius and abilities. However, what you are trying to accomplish is two folded.
You want webmasters to understand what you are doing is not wrong and what 888 is condoning is not wrong. In your ideal world this might be true, however on these forums it must be made clear that we do not support these actions because no matter how you spin the wheel what you are doing is wrong even though legally there might not be recourse, IMO it is still wrong.
You state nothing can be done to combat sites which steal content and use in the form of scraper sites, but I disagree completely. Pressure can be applied on the programs turning a blind eye to their affiliate partners who actively participate in this unethical and illegal activity. Indeed to sit back and take no action whatsoever, allows the industry to become more tarnished.
Causing the wild west to revive on the internet is not good from the user’s point of view. That, at the end of the day is my approach to good ethics. The internet belongs to the user, does your site provide the user with good quality unique content that are a valuable contribution to the quality the internet provides or are you the gangster who bomb people with crap just to get the clicks for your selfish financial gains.
As far as the DDOS attacks are concerned, I have no opinion. It has always to me been an act of your typical hacker, something I also did when I was in my teens. If it was you behind it, I doubt it as I have way to much respect for you to believe that you would be guilty of such a childish act.
just to make it clear: you said “You want webmasters to understand what you are doing is not wrong and what 888 is condoning is not wrong. In your ideal world this might be true, however on these forums it must be made clear that we do not support these actions because no matter how you spin the wheel what you are doing is wrong even though legally there might not be recourse, IMO it is still wrong. “
i do not do content scrapping like this, this is a techniques which was used by BH 5 years ago, the techniues today are much better and do not involved content scrapping at all, but that is for another discussion.
and i also do not support these techniques , (if that was not clear from my prev. post), i do say that such is life and trying to think what we can all do to fight this (and our sites are scrapped too – take a look at that asshole sites that were reported)
the problem is that there are new comers to teh BH world which are not that advenced so they are using these scrapping techniques.
you also said that “Pressure can be applied on the programs turning a blind eye to their affiliate partners who actively participate in this unethical and illegal activity. Indeed to sit back and take no action whatsoever, allows the industry to become more tarnished.” , let me show you a case and see how would you act on it, lets say a BH seo is doing the wrong thing and then redirect his traffic to the term “casino” on a small PPC provider, a larger PPC provider buys listing on that term in the little PPC provider (happen all the time), we are all bidding for that term on that big PPC provider, is that wrong to bid there? do we really know the source of that PPC traffic, all I am saying that looking a few steps ahead the approche of banning and crying is pointless and you better direct your efforts in enlarging your community.
just me 2 cents, not trying to justify anyone, and really trying to geta reality check and maybe as a result of this thread and provocating things said here a solution will emerge, but i am looking for a REAL solution and not something which i can see even now that is not workingHi Janet
I am sorry for the misunderstanding. I replied to your post according to my understanding to what your intention was for the post. If you are posting to be objective by all means distance yourself from my remarks and opinions but I hardly view your opinion as a reality check as it is just another typical blackhat approach to the internet being a free for all happy go lucky world. This is still your opinion or an opinion and I raise mine to debate your opinion or a opinion.
Your PPC example sure creates another debate of where to draw the line, however I am very particular on where I spent my marketing budget. Sites I advertise with are thoroughly investigated and I will not support any doubtful businesses.
Give me a few days, I will respond with the advice of Raymond, Hobbit, Steve m, Frankilin Davis,Kous van dout and others. It will take a while to collect all the personal insights to this ever growing problem. Perhaps Eric will respond, I hope he makes it to VEGAS. greek39/esr/
If someone capitalizes on my work without permission it is theft.
Very simple.
Most times I just ignore it, but when it interferes with my conducting my own business you can be sure I will go after it.
The personal views from the people I mentioned are all contributors to the internet not the www. They also strongly beleive in hackerethic, ie cracking okay, for fun and exploration as long as no theft, vandalism or breach of trust has occurred.
But this will take valuable time away from my main goal, and just may take longer than expected. We will see where this productive discussion leads. greek39^*/
yep, let’s name a few google, yahoo msn etc. , i am not joking, YOU by not writing some restrictive rules in the htaccess or robots.txt or the page allowed them to take your content, index it and show snippets of it and even distribute it using the web and rss to 3rd party (which in your case some of the 3rd party are people which take this content and build “new” content pages) without them promissing you ANY financial gain what so ever.
all of these SE capetelize on your work, sell ads abd clicks etc. (and they are doing much more then we all do together)
so where do you draw the lines both legally and morally ?
i know you are pissed and i know you take it personal but i am still trying to be objective and play the devil advocate, again , i am not endorcing scrapping behavier but i am trying to put the right prespective and bring a reality check on it.
they may have not even scraped your site, they may have scraped google SERPs ….
Iwill repeat it again for the guys did not get it from the prev discussions. If someone takes your whole site, that is illegal – a few sentences is not illegal and because someone think it is “immoral” and report it to vendors, when in fact the ONLY ISSUE IS THEY USIALIZE SEO LESS. No way does it in any way harm a site ranking or anything to have a few of your sentences displayed on other sites – when I copy a block of content from some of my “real sites” into google search it returns 5k results sometimes! These “real-sites” sites rank fine. – to me it says that it has no effect what so ever, if any the effect is good since i am getting motre backlinks.
To the point – in what way could the person scrapping have possibly scraped and harmed any webmaster? Even if a couple sentences appeared on his site, as they say HE CLOAK and no one sees it – this obviously would NEVER be the reason the scrapper rank? Where is the harm? i also think the scrapper do not crawl anyones sites for content.
Lastly, it is not the vendors responsibility to determine whether a site in their network is acting within the fair use laws. Lawyers can barely determine this, no less affiliate managers!
and if a vendor doesn’t want the traffic it takes 10 minutes for the scrapper to point it elswhere (there are over 1200 vendors out there), I must say that this problem is not unique to our industry – it is everywhere and no one of the vendors care about any of this noise . (and i am talking about vendors like the biggest banks, credit card companies, insurance, auto, and online comerce lik eebay and such)
but i still want to get some constructive ideas in how to resolve this.
If it interferes with my being able to do business I have to go after it.
What do you expect, people sitting back and watching their businesses shrivel up and saying: oh, ok, nothing constructive to be done here?
Someplace theory stops and reality sets in.
And in reality, these practices need to be stopped and we know exactly where and when.
Who all else does the same thing with no ill effect is irrelevant.
And the only recourse affiliates have is the affiliate programs who fund this stuff.
If you can’t go after it with the law, you have to cut off the money supply.
Also, I am not at all convinced this cannot be fought legally, I have varying opinions on that.
BTW,
white hat can achieve serps it want to target too, without upsetting other people’s heard earned SERPS.
Proof in point:
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=888.com+casino+on+net&meta=
I must ask Janet respectfully, do your endorse 888.com marketting strageties. What are some of your brief thoughts on the matter? I am pretty sure you are aware of the script auction house. A place to go for malicious hacker scripts, the highest neophite bidder takes it.
greek39
Dominique wrote:If it interferes with my being able to do business I have to go after it.it is yet not clear to me how does this interferes with you being able to do business , i have NO INDICATION what so ever that it hurts your ranking, if any, it just improves it due to teh additional links and the brand recognition feeling.
also, the content of the scrapper site not seen by the regular users since it is immediatly directed to a “money” page, but take google, your snippet is seen there and it may well be that tha user that was intrested in the information you provided already gets the answer by looking at the snippet of the text in google AND NEVER EVEN GO TO YOUR SITE and simply click one of the ads in google
but yet you allow google to show snippets, think about it, who hurts you more ? and morei mportent then this, what can you do .
the thread is becoming more productive by the moment …
Janet wrote:.the thread is becoming more productive by the moment …
It just hit a brick wall because I am not a working example of what this does and does not do to profitablility.
I have never watched my SERPS, and I am not about to go into a big research project to prove my point here, I have a site to take care of. I am all customer service, and not SEO.
You need to look at what it does to a smaller site that actually can identify the location of the loss of a couple hundred SE positions.
The most I can detect is a slowing of growth. How much money is actually lost – it would cost me a bundle to conduct the research to find out.
But it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that every lost SE position is a loss of income.
When you have 15,000 sites scraping you, it has to have an impact. Or else the scraper isn’t worth anything anyway and he will just disappear shortly.
Just had a quick check on google, using the names of sites without spaces and their tld extension, who have rogued 888 and it appears many have been hit by these sites with .pl and .info domain names.
Sites affected and which have subsequently accrued these thousands of backlinks are:
onlinecasinoreviewer.com
gamblog.co.uk
gamesandcasino.com
choicegambling.comThis is definately a crude attempt at google bowling our sites and there are many more being hit in addition to those four sites listed above.
This means we were correct in our action in roguing 888 en masse for their failure to police their affiliate network. 888 and/or the Super Scraper who promotes them using stolen content must be very pissed off and be hurting by our just and right course of action in roguing 888.
Fully well knowing this, means I will be sinking a few beers in celebration as a result
greek39 wrote:I must ask Janet respectfully, do your endorse 888.com marketting strageties. What are some of your brief thoughts on the matter? I am pretty sure you are aware of the script auction house. A place to go for malicious hacker scripts, the highest neophite bidder takes it.greek39
888.com marketting strageties is their own biz, i am not the one to say if it is Ok or not, if someone feel offended he needs to clear it up with them and if not then take some other action, as long as it can benefit him or the group in the long run.
my thoughts on the matter is (and i do not want to offend anyone and be complitly frank) is that people are looking at their traffic and seeing scrapper sites that are doing better SEO then them (see my 1st post on this thread) rank higher then them. yep , it is upsetting but as long as the scrapper has not done anything that is agaist the law, i do not see anything you can do, the best opu can do is be better in SEO and learn the tricks of the trade and don’t assume that content is everything since we all know that it is not.
i was not familier with the website you mentioned, some people mistaken people which are using aggresive SEO and malicious hacker, it is not the same, you can do aggresive SEO and still be in the boundries of the law.
moral is a very subjective thing, you can not take someone to court based on that ….if someone is doing a better job in SEO then you and you can not compete, then drop out of the race, do not pay attention to your position in the SERPs , it is that simple, if you do want to compete – then learn, use tools, consult with others , so many people have asked me SEO questions in private and i helped them
no one will do the SEO work for you, the fact that you ASSUME that your site serves the visitor better then the scrapper site is a very subjective thing, the scrapper may think that by redirecting the traffic directly to the vendor he serves the visitor better the showing him a lot of content while he just want to start playing, the SE view on this is also subjective and google have a diffrent subjective view on what are the site ranks for a specific term while MSN has a diffrent subjective view and ranking and any other SE.this is the reality, now I do think white hat sites can win and it may be even easier for them to win if they will utialize the tools out there, there is no legal issue in using these tools, maybe moral things (like getting links from places you did not talked with directly but you both aggreed on some links dealing aggrement)
I also think that there is no such thing as pure white hat, if you change your title tag, or exchanged or even asked for link, your not white hat anymore …
it is all diffrent shades of gray …the shade level of gray is in the eye of the beholder
I hope that the message clear
There are many distinctions between screen scraping and web scraping. I would like to function web scraper. A scaper in this context is one that pull information from another site in the hopes of ranking high. Somtimes they will do it through webcrawlers/webspiders/webrobots/ants/automatic indexes/worms ect…
rss feeds are a scraper delight, does echoe,echoe,echoe, ring any bells how about fix,fix,fix,
Is this not a malicious hack for php. A server sends this out shouldn’t the server be help responsible?By default I believe domains are protected within the framework of the www.
I am touching the tip of the problem right now. This is a huge topic and will take a long time to get some real answers. Was it not a screen scrape/malicious hack back in the 80’s that brought forth the 128 encrypt instead of the forty. greek39
