No offense to your thread but I have to say this. I am a little disappointed in the fact that you guys really believe that these proxy sites are causing problems for your directories. This is not true, if these sites are creating dup content then it will be the proxy sites that will be affected not yours. Keep in mind that the pages you created in your directory are the original source and therefore can not go into dup content unless you yourself also copied the pages from a different source. Comon guys, no need to panic over this issue it is not a big deal and will not affect your sites in anyway. If there is a proxy site out ranking you then I would say you have some work to do with your directories. And for the directories that have taken a hit by google all I can say is that google has to put someone there in the results and therefore the sites which are the most relevant (so-called) will be the ones that will pop up. I just think there is to much over reaction regarding this issue.
Great post, if directories stopped doing all the wrong then it won't be penalized, thus the proxies won't be above it in the rankings. Anyway, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
No offence taken, but do you have any evidence that backs up your comments. How do you know that the original source cannot be moved to duplicate content? Is it ok if I copy your entire site and publish it on my server, post up a few links to it and start generating traffic to my site based off of your work?
Well like most things with google I do not have any conceret evidence that this is true, but from what I understand about dup content if you submit one article to 50 article directories the first site to get crawled with that article will be know as the original article and all the others will go dup or supplemental. No, I'm not saying it is ok to copy someone else's site but this is the role of a proxy site and what it does. It is just a way for someone who does not have full access to your site to still be able to view it. For example coolweb (dp member) can not access my site via the address bar so the only way to do it is through proxy, I do not mind that, call it shared traffic if you will.
One more thing. It has been almost a year since I started this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=161314 when I had found the same thing. At that time this site even had the same page rank on all of the pages. It was gone after about a week or so and I have'nt seen it since. I think the same will happen on any directory going through this as well.
Yes and in this case it is fine, and in an ideal world that would be great but that is not *just* how they are being used. I have stated over and over again that the problem is not the fact that proxies cache the content but the fact that it is then linked to. It is the linkage which then causes the "hack" and that is when penalties start getting handed out. The reason I asked for proof was not to be argumentative with you, I respect your points but I disagree with you. The article which Pheonix linked to and which a lot of this work is based off explains that the web site in question was out ranked by these proxy sites which were caching the web sites content and being linked to. Therefore it is not as straight forward as Site A had the content first therefore Site B is a duplicate. What most people seem to forget is that Google has multiple spiders fetching this information at any given time from different datacentre's and they are clearly not working together or at least not working together correctly. I have also stated on several occasions that I do not know that this is the cause of the current penalty against directories, I have never claimed it because I do not have the proof to back up such a statement. But I have stated that there is potential for it to be involved just as much, and if not, more so than a lot of the other theories currently roaming around. I am not trying to create panic and I don't beleive that anyone has panicked as a result of this thread, people are just protecting themselves and there is nothing wrong with that. That may very well have been exactly how it used to work, but when you have multiple crawlers it is no longer that straight forward.
Well I will agree with your point on the spiders and how they do not seem to be working together. I'll also agree that these guys should not be linking to the proxy pages, that is clearly out of line. And you're right, there is nothing wrong with people wanting to use procation just in case. But to be honest this is only going to affect the directory owners who are no longer ranking for there domain name. Once this penalty is over those sites will get their spots back but the proxies will most likely still be there as well, at least for a little while longer. I do not know the exact reason why google did what they did to directories, but I am pretty sure that proxy sites having nothing to do with. Most of the directories where already hit before this was even discovered.
Yes they have existed for a long time, but very few people knew that they could affect the SERPS in the way that they now know since that article was published in the middle of August. Well I am trying to prove this either way, as mentioned in another thread I already have a honey trap setup and I am Proxy Hacking it myself to determine the effects and I will post my results good or bad when I have the data to do so.