Spammers Hijacking Listings In Google
 

A large number of web masters are facing their search engine nightmare: Their Google listings have been taken over by another site.

(September 13 2004) The search engines are constantly bothered by spammers, i.e. webmasters who try to manipulate search engine results to gain more traffic. Earlier this year Pandia reported on one culprit who had actually copied large portions of the Pandia site and presented it as his own.

This is, of course, a problem in its own right, as he or she is stealing your copyrighted material.

From a search engine perspective there is another problem: Google hates duplicate web pages, as it interprets them as a attempt at spamming the search engine. Because of this it might ban one or two of the sites. Yes, your site may be banned because someone else has copied it!

Such cases are in clear violation of international copyright laws, and you may bring the copycat to court. However, spammers have now find a new way of stealing search engine listings. They are using the meta refresh tag.

more here:
http://www.pandia.com/sw-2004/40-hijack.html


On a related note:

Now, I've seen I-Frame advertising being promoted recently. This type of ad basically pulls up a page from your site on another's site as an advertisement. What are your opinions of how Google would interpret this? Do you think, for example, I could be seen as a spammer by Google for using this advertising method?

meta refreshes have been around since, well, almost since I started. in 1996. They are a very common way to trick bots into all sorts of weird behaviors.

There is no end of people out there who will use the contents or names of other sites in spam campaigns that at the end damage the ORIGINAL site more than anything else.

Alex

Max,

This is not new.. and you will even find a couple of threads here and here


This bastard.. http://www.igotguns.com/guide/ (pop-ups) is one of the worst!

Unfortunately there is no way to truly protect against it.. Ask any of the webmasters that have been around for a while and we have all had the variations on "site stealing" happen to most of us..
|angry|

DD

Its getting some extra attention right now cause some of the big boys over at WMW have had their big sites hijacked - and they're throwing a stink - and Google basically is telling them to pack sand |jester|

Now that just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling...

;-}

|spam|

Somebody
Placed
Above
Me

Google are not really interested in anything beyond themselves.