This is my second installment of an attack on my site, and other sites we operate, first installment is here entitled website attacked.

Attacked Part II
Yesterday I wrote about the attack that was waged against this site and a couple of others we own. You may know that Google is against duplicate content on the internet. Therefore if you duplicate your articles and links throughout the web Google will ban your site from the listings. This is one of the many things you should not do.

Now most articles I found on the subject talk about how others will take your content because they want to use it as their own. Taking all your content verbatim is obviously a copyright violation. There are two negative effects for the owner, probably more, but here are two: (1) your content is being claimed as anothers and (2) your entire site could be banned by Google. Typically when a site owner is stealing content it is with the intention of having your content as their own so they do not have to do any work and immediately have content for their site. Some of this stealing is manual cut and paste but more than likely it is a scraping tool or plugin.

Malicious and Intentional Attack
Here is one of the things that happened to this site, pointed out by my security buddies. The first of many that they find I am sure. As I mentioned one of the worst things you can do for search engine indexing is to duplicate your content across multiple sites.  Google sees this as you trying to mess with their system to get multiple listings of the same article in the results. You could actually be attacked by someone, or a group of people, intentionally submitting you to sites extremely fast so you are scraped and instantly banned. But what if it is done to you, in other words someone else has your content cloned intentionally in order to take your site out of search engine rankings? More below. First, let us look at how it is done.

How It Is Done
The above content copying is considered a blackhat SEO trick and that is why Google bans you. We had it done to us by someone else to intentionally get us banned.  There are multiple blackhat networks online you can pay to do this for you (and no, I will not give you links).  You give them money and the domain and they scrape the entire content of the domain and post it to multiple web properties.  When google indexes your site, they see duplicate content and black ball you from the results. Some people do it for their own site, others do it to you intentionally. Here is an image showing you a couple of examples of the duplicate content:

As you can see my original post “WordPress Comment System Intense Debate” was scraped from longest.com and used word for word on ingeniouswebmaster.com and http://inartmedia.com as were all my articles on many different websites.

What Can Be Done to Stop This?
I found two great articles by author Jonathan Bailey, the first on another site entitled Protecting Your Content on WordPress.com and the second entitled Two New Anti-Scraping WordPress Plugins that explains how to try to prevent this happening. The second article mentions two particular plugins that will help you track down those sites the content is on. I am trying one of the plugins now. My security friends are monitoring the site and logs now, but if you cannot afford the expense of these types of services (I am getting it gratis) then I suggest you take a look at the articles above and Jonathan’s site. Jonathan’s entire site is fantastic for the topic of plagarism and many tips can also be used to find those that copy your content and if you are attacked intentionally the goal is to find the attacker.

Who Can You Report it To?
Contact Google, let them know what is happening and show them proof.  I did this by changing out all my images to say “This article plagiarized from longest.com” so when google checks in on it, they will see that it is not my content. You can also reports those copying content. You can also obviously file copyright suits in court, but those are the sites themselves. You want them on your side by providing a reward, for example. The real goal is to find the individual(s) responsible so you can bring civil and potentially criminal charges (I am looking into this one).

More
That is just the first thing we located, there may be more. We are looking at other types of attacks such as link farms. More posts and information to come.

Reward
By the way, if anyone tracks down the culprits before the security team we will pay a $1,000 reward, proof is necessary.