My site been copied and now not on Google

[robinantill]

My site has been up for about 5 years and is normally in the top 2 or 3 for the the search word - metal sheds. Site address is Metal Sheds Online Steel, Metal, Plastic, PVC Garden Buildings, Storage Sheds and Garages . I noticed in the last week that it had disappeared from Google and even searching down through the pages I was unable to find it. I did find two of my internal pages not but not the front page.

I initially thought is could be due to the last shake up in Google and that things would settle down so I kept checking, but nothing. Last night I searched for "metal sheds online" and a site came up which is an exact copy of mine under a difference domain name www.spartiates.info/ When you click on the link in Google it comes up with PageNotFound but if you look at the cache you can see the source page is exactly as mine
Metal Sheds Online Steel, Metal, Plastic, PVC Garden Buildings, Storage Sheds and Garages

Google has found that this web site is exactly like mine and has deleted my site from Google which is obviously wrong. It appears that someone has targetting my site to get it removed from Google, as www.spartiates.info/ does not connect to them so they can take orders so can only be malicous.

How, do I contact Google to inform them of this so I can get this put right?

Regards,
Robin

[chandrika]

If you fill out the spam report here
Google Report a Spam Result

I think someone at Google actually looks at the site in question.

I say that rather than the remove url tool, as although we get a 404, it could be that Googlebot is seeing something else.

[davebarnes]

I am confused.
I did this at both google.com and google.co.uk
site: http: //www.metal-sheds-online .co.uk
and got 118 pages found.

[robinantill]

Hi,

Thank you for your replies. I did manage to send an email to Google using their spam report and also I found another form, don't know where now.

Thankfully, last night when I checked for 'metal sheds' my site was back up and the other one has gone. Perhaps it was a coincidence after my email to Google, but I am just happy my site is back.

It is worrying that someone could just copy my site using 'page source' and post this as their site with a good chance that my site may be the one suspected of being a duplicate site and removed from Google.

Regards,
Robin

[incrediblehelp]

This might help:

Someone finally copied my website!

[chandrika]

Its funny I get this quite alot with .info sites.

It is interesting reading your experience Incredihelp, as I have also wondered why are they doing this, I cant see how it benefits them in anyway. But it does seem it is simply about doing damage to my site, rather than promoting their own.

I am not 100% sure if it does any damage, although my stats are weird, not at all steady like all my other sites. And often when my stats take a sudden tumble I do this check and see a fresh lot of these .infos with my content.

I just do a spam report each time, then my stats steady out again. But its annoying and they are always anonymously hosted too.

It is always .info sites though, I guess they must be cheap or something.

[janeth]

As long as you have more backlinks coming into your site then they do, they will have a hard time knocking you out.

[kronikmedia]

Google results do fluctuate at times. At times I have found that my website has lost its rank and moves a few pages down. But then again after a few hours or maximum a couple of days its back up. As such if I see my rank disappear I do not worry about it as I know it will only be temporary. HAs any one else faced this issue?

[Old Welsh Guy]

Originally Posted by davebarnes

I am confused.
I did this at both google.com and google.co.uk
site: http: //www.metal-sheds-online .co.uk
and got 118 pages found.

by 'missing from Google' i assume they mean missing from the SERP's. It has long been a black hat trick to mirror a site onto a higher page rank url structure, and by doing this, the original page will be filtered out at the time of search as being the lesser important page. it IS effectively you taking you out of google, as no-one wants to be in the google database, they want to be in the Search results.

I blogged about this a while back Old Welsh Guy The Google Expert » Beating the Content Thieves - stolen website content one of the main things you need to do is file a DMCA report (instructions in blog post).

let them have their copy of the site, but focus first on getting Google to remove them. They are far more likely to respond to a DMCA report than a spam report, as the DMCA report is a legal matter while spam is a quality issue

[Mads Dam]

You could use this to locate more copies of your site: Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Site Content Copyright Protection

[davidweb]

Originally Posted by robinantill

top 2 or 3 for the the search word - metal sheds.

Your website is perfectly OK and it is showing on top position for your selected keyword. Therefore you dont need to worry about this aspect.

Search engines go into snake shedding phases where they filter their previous database, applies some new changes, calculates their new back links etc etc.

It could be possible that your competitor tried to play this duplicate trick to pull down your rankings temporarily, but in the current scenrio it looks like Google has been able to detect the other duplicate website.

If other website indeed used this duplicate trick, then they wont show up again on Google.co.uk, unless and until they produce their unique content.

Search engines cannot grant trust rank to a new website which simply copies content from other existing websites.

[zeruel]

Originally Posted by janeth

As long as you have more backlinks coming into your site then they do, they will have a hard time knocking you out.

I seconded that. If you're site is much better in terms of quality links and SE rankings, I guess it will be hard to just knock you off the SERP...