Thieves of the Internet
How would you feel if your site started to rank after a couple of months working to get it there and then the next thing it just disapears into thin air never to be seen again.
One of our affiliates on Clickbank decided it is a good idea to copy our index page exactly as is add some javascript code for their affiliate link and save it as a page on their site, they even put their own copy at the bottom of the site saying copyright belongs to the author.
We found 3 pages like that on three different websites. I am not quite sure why they do that. We discovered this through Google Analytics crawler error pages. The link looks like this www.yourwebsite.com/x.oSrc and www.yourwebsite.com/x.osrc each link has 3 links to it from 3 different sites and those links leads to what looks exactly like an older version of our index page. So in effect Google sees 3 duplicate sites and that could be why our site is not ranking anymore.
When you go to these websites they have a long list of products they sell at the bottom of their page. Clicking on the links to other products we discovered they do this with all the products they sell - copy the vendor's site and add code to it for their affiliate link.
Here are the links to these sites. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Health and Fitness for example go to the vendors site and see they are exact duplicates of the vendors site.
Definitely not the way to go in affiliate marketing.
Recent Comments
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I have actually seen some courses that show you how to do this.....I'm assuming you still get your portion of the sale? I always thought it was questionable to do this.....
I think you lust have to fight back and try to get them banned by Google as you are doing. It sucks and is hard work, but co-operate with Google and other hosts to help them block the offenders. Given time they will in the meantime it is just real bad luck and we are behind you in your attempts to stop it!
Looks like the first 2 sites were taken over by the same person...man that sucks. Looks like they are based out of china.
Hi Roger, thanks for the info. We have contacted them and they have removed the pages now. It would be nice to be able to teleport yourself to these people and confront them face to face. Maybe that's why they copy because their english is so bad.
One consolation is that the english is appalling. Almost unreadable in some cases.
If they are straight copies and therefore potentially breaching copyright then it would be worth contacting their webhost. Here is what Ezine articles suggested to me I do about articles https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/wa_forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=85149 and what Hubpages asks you to do if there is copied material on their sitehttp://hubpages.com/faq/#copyright Everysite is different of course and it may depend on where the hosting is but you never know it might just get results. Roger
We've reported them at Google, blacklisted them as our affiliates and asked Google for reconcideration of our site. We also alerted some of the vendor sites known to us, hopefully they will get into action as well. The damage has been done and our traffic is slowing down but will hopefully be up and running soon. First time I have seen anything like this. Thanks for the comments.
It reminds me of a month ago when my article was stolen. They still have it on their site. This all makes me very discouraged and it really makes me just want to quit because what good is it to do all the work and then someone just takes it. What can be done for you? Can't you get some advice from some of these top buddies here at WA? Where is Kyle and Carson?
These kinda thing smake me wonder about getting into campaigns were ya have to give your affiliate links to a web master. I may be off base here, but I am very cautious.
Wow! Go after them Andre. That's absolutely lousy! Send your attorney after them. Is this common practice? Nerve! Let us know how you handle it and what happens.
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So you have lost ranking for your keywords in the search results or has your actual domains been taken over?
It would seem to me if they copied your page and placed it on their domain they would still have to build their own back links to out rank you.
Just trying to understand. Lets us know more about what you are doing to protect yourself from this in the future.
Thanks for posting this!