For a holiday rental property I have a site (bastide-vacances.com)that has been top in google.com for ages, for easy keywords (eg 'gite villereal'). Just seen it has been pushed to number 2 by the following, which has grabbed my info and used keyword padding etc is there anything i can do to stop them? http://www .vacation-silverweil.com/www.bastide-vacances.com_vacation-gite-villereal-travel-monflanquin-holiday-vacance-lot-et-garonne-dordogne-pool-re_b5ad03cf7c631b3d99163a4599ad59b7
it is annoying when these scammers do this. You could try reporting it to Google, they dislike Scammers on their search engine (though seem to accept them in their Adwords program, go figure)
Contact the company that hosts his sites, http://www.knipp.de/ and let them know you'll file suit for hosting copywrited content. I've done it before and it does work most of the time (in my experience).
Find their Whois info and e-mail them directly, stating that if they don't remove your material from their website you will not hesitate to report them to Google's AdSense Fraud Department (assuming they're using AdSense of course,) and also to their hosting company. This doesn't always work, but has worked on almost every occasion that I've tried it Usually they will apologize, and come up with some lame excuse about how it was just an experiment, or a test or something. Kinda pathetic...
I have pretty good luck reporting scammers to Google and Google AdSense (when they use it) but I've reported this one twice linking to two clients and it's still up last time I checked. The more info you can provide (by carefully checking out their code) the more likely Google will remove that site from ranking above the site in question or prevent it's linking all together Here is a sample of the letter I sent to G.Spam and G.Adsense re Silverweil They have used the sites Title (3x), Description (3x) and Keywords (3x) on their page which includes in the title, description and keyword tags on THIER page. They also put the site's Keywords in a H2 tag when they list the sites keywords on their webpage (32 word of H2 spam) They link to the sites in their directory but have a nofollow on the link. THEY DO THIS TO EVERYONE THEY "LINK" TO! --------- I don't thing this one has broken enough rules is why it's still up. If anyone can see any other rules they've broken please let us know so we can complain some more. it's surprising this site is ranking at all with all that deprecated code.
Yep, i hate to go offtopic a minute, but before google keeps doing all these extras, it should first fix its search engine (which has been screwed up since big daddy with dead links etc), then dump all the scammers and spammers from its adwords program. Oh and then dont treat Publishers in Adsense like crap.
try reporting to google and your site should be capable of withstanding such attacks from spammers you have to be more intelligent than others
Thanks to all for the suggestions. I've reported them to google, now I'll try adsense (I assume that's why they have done it, they have plenty of adsense ads) and their host as well. I can't say I understand how they can be number 1 with a site like that, perhaps playing by the rules isn't the best approach after all. Like I didn't know that already. Cheers
Rasputin, have you tried asking them to take it down? I've had more luck going this route than with any of the others. AdSense will require that you file a DMCA report, as will their hosting company. Often, threatening to do these things gets a lot more achieved than actually doing them Good Luck!
Reporting them to google is the best way. Works most of the time, but you should also contact theirs host provider, which will surely take steps to stop them
It's against most hosts TOS, I usually send a cease and decist to the contact in the WHOIS lookup and CC the hosts's abuse@ address. Usually the site is down before the registrant reacts.
Update: I contacted them directly as Dead Elvis suggested and just received the following response: Dear... We are sorry you dont like be on our site. We have removed your url from our web-directory. Seems promising. The page now comes up with the message "Für Ihre Abfrage sind keine Daten verfügbar!" anyone here know German? is that a 404 message? I suppose I now to have to wait for google to lose the dead page from the index...about 2008 then.
Contacting the owner (a thief) or the Host (usually the same as owner of crooked sites because thiefs host their own site) only gets one link removed. Contacting Google often gets the whole site out of the SERPs
Huh? I fail to see what you're banging on about? Copywritten Material If he wrote the original material then nobody else is allowed to use it without his permission. Some links to web hosts T&C, perhaps you should do your research before you embarass yourself? http://www.visn.co.uk/terms.html http://www.easyspace.com/terms.php It's not a case of having to prove it, in cases like list a host or site owner will remove it, which it looks like they've done in this case Perhaps you can go back to being the forum troll now?
Hosts don't always take down content that appears to be stolen. Even with a DMCA report sent to the host they have to present it to their client and if they dispute the report then the host can do nothing more and this matter has to be taken up in court. I'm not a lawyer--just speaking from experience.