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Page Jacking

Anyone who runs a content rich website will be familiar with other sites ripping off their content. Sometimes this is done with an outbound-link back to the original content, sometimes it is more blatant and sometimes it is even an error. I've had content copied by companies and organizations that should really know better. Many people forget that just because something is on the web it is still subject to copyright laws. Unfortunately with the web being such an international medium enforcing those laws can be difficult. It is an unfortunate situation, the web was designed for linking to useful content but it seems too tempting for some people just to copy and paste what they find to enhance their website.

Wholesale rip-offs of multiple pages, even whole sites happen. This is referred to as page-jacking. The jacked pages are identical to the originals, same titles, meta-data and content. There are two motivation for page jacking, more themed content can increase the overall ranking of a site to search engines and the stolen pages can earn money through product sales or via content targeted advertising. The danger for the original site is that black-hat SEOers can boost the stolen pages far above their own in search engine results and duplicate content algorithms may actually penalize the real website.

A more technically complex form of jacking sucks the content directly off your website by screen scraping. Recently site owners have seen an even more advanced technique using page redirects. When Googlebot and AltaVista's Scooter see temporary '302' redirects sent by the web server or Meta refresh tags contained in HTML pages they index the redirected content but keep the URL of the page making the redirect.

If the site uses cloaking techniques it can serve these redirects just to search engine robots and serve other pages to visitors. The effect is twofold, the original site vanishes from search engine results pages and the new site picks up the ranking of the original. This can be used to feed traffic through to other pages. This tactic is becoming more common and hopefully search engines will address it in the near future. This problem can also occur accidentally as some directories use redirects to link to sites so they can count click-throughs.

If you notice a large drop in traffic from a particular search engine it is worth investigating whether your site has been a victim of page-jacking. Copyscape <http://www.copyscape.com/> can take a URL to one of your web pages and search for copies or part copies. You can do the same by taking unique phrases and typing them into search engines. A redirect page will contain your description and title but will have the URL of the page-jacker's website. If you click on the 'cache' button on Google or Yahoo! you will see what the robot actually indexed, which will be your original page.

If the copying is unintentional then an email to the webmaster will usually be sufficient to get the content removed. This won't work with more hardcore page-jackers. Use a tool such as whois or SamSpade <http://www.samspade.org> to find out who claims to own the site and who there internet service provider or webhost is. Find out if they are selling products through an affiliate scheme or using content target advertising. Contact all these people pointing out the problem, you can do this by email in the first instances but follow up with a fax is there is no quick response. In the case of Redirects the websites are not actually copying your content, just exploiting the way search engines sometimes index content. Search engines and ISPs are notoriously unresponsive so you should fax as well as email. You can quote the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which might elucidate a quicker response.

Technical solutions to redirects by the website are not possible as the problem is with the search engine robot visiting your site through a redirect. There will be no referrer information and the visit will look just like a normal visit by a robot. The search engine could block sites with large numbers of 302 redirects although there are genuine reasons for their use.

Page Jacking

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