Content Theft

Posted on 2004/06/10 22:16:33 (June 2004) by john.

Do something original you useless gits.

Every so often in a bored moment I'll have a search around on the web for "maison de stuff" to see if anyone new (no, anyone at all) has linked to us. Maybe even - god forbid - they might have written a few nice words about our site.

On my most recent search, I have become quite annoyed about the amount of pseudo-search sites that seem to just grab a few lines at random from a handful of websites, put a link to each site, and then of course have loads of adverts (where they make their money).

As an example, in the top 10 Google results for "maison de stuff" is an entry entitled "Ladies Night Pictures in directory.co.uk". Upon clicking this link you are presented with twenty supposed search results, turned into a static page with a permanent URL, which may have at one time contained a link to an article or a set of pictures on the 'Maison (presumably the RAF Club Ladies' Night). They then nick a bit of our text, put it in (and fairly out of context I might add), and then link to our site. As a bizarre aside, the page did also seem to mention something about Castle Donington, the village I grew up in, which I found a little odd, but I digress.

Similarly, next down on Google's results is an entry titled "English Humour websites at uk250.co.uk". They've picked up a bit from the article I wrote about Multilingual Humour, and interspersed that with a load of adverts.

Onto the next ten and we have "Maison search, Maison sites at b2bYellowpages.com", followed by the rather bizarre "board book case head" then "Shopping Resources - Maison", and after that "jonnie proudly presents at Gawwk.co.uk", not forgetting my particular favourite "Cross Dressers - ChilliSearch Reviewed Websites". Everyone of these results is basically the same thing - a webpage which has ripped off a bit of our content, put it in a supposed search / directory page, just to get more hits from Google.

It seems what these sites do is just generate a load of static URLs, one for each of a few thousand of the most commonly searched for phrases. They then populate it with what basically amounts to the results another search engine would give you, intermingled with some blatant adverts, with extracts from each page, knowing that this in itself will then attract the search engines back to their site, and get them their advertising revenue.

What are these people actually contributing to the internet? They aren't actually providing any kind of useful search facility, their "directory" pages are clearly compiled automatically, and many of the links are fairly off topic from whatever it is the supposed search term was. All they really do is clog up the web, so decent honest search engines like Google can't see the wood for the trees.

Besides, I am irked by the fact that they are, in a sense, making money from our content - it is my interesting choice of words used in my articles and pictures pages that catch the search engines, and yet some Johnny conman with a bit of webspace and a crappy script is making money out of copying and pasting that content into their shitty pointless webpages.

Sometimes I feel like there are only a handful of us on the web actually trying to fill it with any kind of useful or interesting material.

It makes me very annoyed.

On the plus side, it will help google associate your site to sensless crappy directory sites.

Posted by dsp at 2004/06/11 09:58:48.

Yes, and somewhere on the web now there will be another one of these sites with "senseless crappy directory sites" as a category, and your comment will be it's number one resource.

Posted by John at 2004/06/11 10:37:40.

Slap a copyright notice on the main page. Surely that'll do the trick?

Posted by Rusty at 2004/06/18 23:10:06.

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