Scrapers, Pagerank, and Links
I will give you the quick and dirty on why I have to link various words in my posts on MoreMerchant.com. As the regular readers know from my previous posts I have a few sites that scrape my site. What this means is that they steal whatever I write and post it on their site. Many sites will steal the first few lines and then link to the main post. This is better than some. You see some steal the content (all of it) and don’t link me. They even go a step further and steal the pictures by linking straight to them. Thus they are stealing my content and my bandwidth.
Big deal you say? Yes, I did to until Google then slapped one of my other sites with a Pagerank of 0 after the content was stolen. The site in question made me a nice chunk of money every month. Not huge but made me over $15K a year. Now even after communicating with Google it still has a Pagerank of 0. I spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on this site for a thief to steal my content and Google to take my pagerank.
So now I link various things in my post. This doesn’t stop the scrapers but it gives me some links back. It doesn’t guarantee a Google Ban or a better Pagerank, but it should help.
If you can’t beat them…
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6 Responses to “Scrapers, Pagerank, and Links”
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Hey Jake,
Shoemoney mentioned in a recent post about a plugin he developed with Joost de Valk that should help with this. Scrapers take from RSS feeds a lot, and this plugin adds a link to your site at the very end. I dunno if it solves your problem completely, but it saves you the trouble of deeplinking every single page… unless you want to.
Can I get the link to that plug in please. And sorry to hear that Jake, the more I read about Google and crap they do the more I come to dislike them. Do you have an email for them so I can contact them, my rank dropped as well and I just need to figure out why.
Jake, I know just how you feel. Thankfully most of my scapers are of the “steal the first 10 lines and give him a link” variety. What really burns me up is when they rank higher for a given keyword than I do, even though I have thousands of back links, my blog’s been around for almost 2 years, and has a PR4. The typical scraper has no PR, has been around for only 6 months or less, and has few backlinks. What gives? In addition, some of them look on Technorati as if they actually posted before I did. You’ll notice if you include links in the first few lines of your post, they conveniently omit them.
Have a great weekend.
Nice post Jake. I read the same article on Shoemoney and agree with Joe.
Yea I got slapped also, my site was up to $1800 a month. after google $900. –it happens.
new year new attitude.
Cheers
Great post! Thanks for the advice on scrapers.
I don’t get it. The “scrapers” are not the reason for the Google problem, right? Those are two separate issues, right? Unfortunately, I know all about the scrapers and I keep deleting their stupid link backs. I had one that made absolutely no sense and looked like the kind of things and porn sites do — write useless, meaningless words.
Google hates me too — from a PR 4 after one year down to a 0. I’m sure I know why but the scraper thing caught my attention. So, what was it you add to chase them away or mess them up? Sorry, please forgive my ignorance.