Google Looks at Republishers
In early February Google announced that they’re changing up their website ranking algorithms once again. This time the change is going to be in regards to folks that publish content from other spots on the web.
The effort is in play to help Google rank the originating website that distributed the information and ding the republishers. It’s been an unfortunate deal that sometimes the site scrapers, those who take your content, lock, body and soul, and republish it on their own site. They do this by stealing your RSS feed mostly, but there are other methods also.
Now Google is taking a bit of stand and looking at these scraping sites with the hopes of giving more credit to the originating sites or yanking search engine ranking credit from the scrapers.
The moral of the story? Do your own work people. Scrapers are a lot like desperate sales people, lazy and looking for that quick buck.
I know myself and others have had issues with this kind of problem. I started setting specific links in my posts that weren’t obvious and also using key, formatted phrases unique to my site. Either the links would show up or the web search bots I employ find the phrases. It became a slight obsession of mine to find where my articles were showing up on scrapersRidiots.com.
I also deployed a few other tricks.
I’ve added a header or tail phrase to the article that printed an extra message ONLY on the scraper sites indicating they weren’t the originators of this material. But you can only go so far with this and its programmer intensive to keep modifying it for the websites. Plus the scrapers just get a bit more tricky and learn to cull those statements from their articles.
Then, I just got the point of blocking specific sites from snagging my info.
What ticked me off is my content is on their lazy websites and it is riddled with their Google Adsense ads. That’s also where I think Google can help everyone. If they find their ads on scraper sites, they should cancel those Google Adsense accounts when they discover them.
This new algorithm could be a great first step in that direction and it’s about time that a piece of the wild-west frontier started to get tamed. [ problogger.net ]
