Could I be penalized?
 

I found this page today, http://ass-ghetto-porn.largedot.net.ru/, where they are copying or scraping my content and using it on the bottom section of their page, unlinking all links scraped.

Will this sorta thing get my site penalized for dupe content? Should I be alarmed by this?

Would leaving the links in place make it anymore right in your opinion?

they didn't even have the decency to remove your &copy from it geeesh! I am not sure but i don't think the SE's will penalize you for it.


Jim

It's not impossible that it could hurt you. It might not, but it might.

You can try reporting it as spam, everyone seems to agree the google spamreport page is working much faster now.

Presumably if it is jsut a section of your page (say 50%) I wouldn't think it would invoke a duplicate penalty. I always thought we were talkign near 100% duplication that invoked that. But I can't say that I'd know for sure. Sorry.

Oh yeah, I wanted to add something.

When you said "could I be penalized", I interpreted that as "could I be hurt?".

True "penaltys" are quite rare, all thing considered. SE problems are almost never penalties.

What can happen is that your pages could be lowered in serp ranking, or put into supplemental results. This isn't a "penalty", altho it can feel like one, and you could say it is one for all practical purposes.

So, "penalized" = no.

"Dropping in the serps" is a possibility. Not necessarily a large one, but a possibility.

Even just seeing somebody else rank above you or near you using your text has a high suckage factor.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I guess there's no way I would ever know for sure if some kind of penalty was in place. One thing I was thinking about, if you could simply copy someones page and get one of them penalized for dupe, possibly the original, then it would be too easy for some to use that to their advantage against their competitors IMHO.

Thanks again.

I think it could hurt them more than it would hurt you. Usually the first site to carry the content (or rather to be crawled with it), is considered the source.

Why not report them to Google though? why should they be in competition with you if they steal your content?

Apparently, G has trouble determining the copy from the original, as shown by a site copying Matt Cutt's blog and listing higher than the blog on G.