Few weeks ago, blogger Azrael noticed that there was a spike an increase of traffic going to his blog site
azraelsmerryland.blogspot.com when He reviewed his referral traffic in Google Analytics and found out that this blog scraped most of his contents and unfortunately copying his feed for almost 5 months.
After reading his Facebook wall post, I investigate and learned that this blog is showing identical contents from Azrael's blog. I researched on how to report this case to Google and read a lot of stuff making sure on how we are going to fix this issue.
This scenario is pretty common online who tries to scrapes most of your content and publish it on different website, sometimes they try use your traffic to earn money and uses web proxies to redirect your website.
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| SPAMMER / SCRAPER |
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| ORIGINAL |
Here's some few tips I had to determine if your site is a victim of duplicate content and where to find them:
1. Perform a web search using Google Search box. Type in
site:yourwebsiteurl.com and know if your website has been indexed by Google. If nothing displayed on search results it means something is wrong and Google might temporarily ban you due to duplicate content or several issues that you violated under their guidelines.
2. If using Google Console / Google Webmaster Tools, check "links to your site" and you'll find incoming links pointing to a website and try to scan them by checking the links column.
3. Run a quick SEO audit on your website. Simply, check your internal links and it should not point to similar websites. Ask someone who has more experience in checking rel=canonical tag and where to implement them.
4. Use duplicate content checker tool like Copyscape and you'll see if someone copied your blog posts
5. Check your RSS feed probably it got compromised or hacked. Or any automatic syndication from Social Networks might be the problem.
How to fight these spammers & scrapers
1. Identify which information you may remove. Read removal policies first before filing a complaint,
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2744324
2. File a removal content report from Google, please make sure you specify your request check this link for additional information,
https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905
3. Be specific of the blog posts you reported.
Here's a response from Removal Google team when they requested to be more specific of the pages to remove:
Since your notice concerns more than one copyrighted work from the same copyright holder, please refile the complaint by inputting the URLs for the first infringed work, then click the 'Add a new group' link to input infringing URLs related to another infringed work.
For example, suppose you would like to report a total of 6 URLs relating to two different copyrightable works. In such a case, you would provide the following information:
Identify and describe work #1: [describe here]
Authorized example of work #1: www.originalURL1.com
Location of allegedly infringing work #1:
www.infringingURL1.com
www.infringingURL2.com
www.infringingURL3.com
Identify and describe work #2: [describe here]
Authorized example of work #2: www.originalURL2.com
Location of allegedly infringing work #2:
www.infringingURL4.com
www.infringingURL5.com
www.infringingURL6.com
4. If you are using Google Webmaster Tools, you can access this page to know if the pages were removed
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard
We still have few more left scraped blog posts to report, hoping Google will ban this account permanently. If you encounter the same issues, please investigate and if you can reach out the person who copied you please do not threaten them instead ask them politely to take down the blog posts or tell them you have already filed a case in Google and the contents will be remove soon.
Btw, this also applies to images and videos (Youtube).
Have a great day and hope you've learned something from this :)
If you have questions, email me at
admin@glamour-social.com or PM me, you know where to find me --
my_misyel, www.glamourmoments.net
Azrael Coladilla is the blogger and founder of Azrael's Merryland Blog. This blog started as a personal blog in 2003, and then converted the blog into a lifeblog about his interest and reporting about pop culture, lifestyle, entertainment, technology, food, travel, toys, outdoor adventure, internet and social media. Awarded as the 2009 Most Influential Blogger for Luzon, Philippines, awarded by the Philippine Blog Awards. He is the founder of several online communities - Manila Bloggers Network, Philippine Bloggers Network, Oh My Food! community, Cavite Bloggers, Travel and Blog Community, and Philippine ToyCon. Azrael's Merryland Blog is included in a list of top 50 Blogs in the Philippines , ranked 65th in Top 100 Blogs that Matter , 49 must read lifestyle blog in the Philippines. and rank 40th in 100 Top Philippine Blogs by Feedspot.
