Google TrustRank drops another point
The Google TrustRank in this case is OUR trust in Google. And MY trust in Google has dipped to a new low after I stumbled upon the Vaitman translations web site. Sponsored by Google, the Vaitman site is very, very deep and Google has indexed 156,000 pages of the main domain, not counting subdomains. The Google funding for this site comes via AdSense which is plastered everywhere. There are ads on their main pages, their content pages, my content pages, your content pages, and of course every translation of each of those pages, in 9 languages.
Here’s how this International piracy operation works. It seems the Vaitman scraper takes your content, translates it into 9 other languages, plasters those with ads, and returns it to Google for distribution. Then Google serves up those ad-filled pages to users of the Google search engine. Users read YOUR content without seeing your branding messages or advertising, they view Google’s branding message and advertising, and if they click on the ads Google and Vaitman make money.
Interested in the topic of SEO but not in English? No problem. Just skip all of those English language sites published on the web, and read the Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or Arabic version. Note that this is not just RSS data or headers or summaries or snippets. These are full articles, often overlaid with their original English versions via Javascript.
Yahoo is in on this, too, but they appear to be a passive fool to the money operation. They have indexed 1800 or so pages, but don’t get any money out of the scam. Ditto for Live.com, which only recognizes a few hundred.
As long as Google permits this sort of blatant copyright infringment (and continues to profit from it) TrustRank will keep dropping for the Big G.
Topical Tags:public relations SEO
December 5th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Whoa, looks like a blog about bots and scrapers, where have we heard this before?
I think you’re misplacing the blame on Google that should be attributed to the bandit stealing pages and scamming the search engine. This instance isn’t as simple as your traditional duplicate content penalty as they would have to be able to semantically interpret and compare the content for it’s intent, which is a bit more than we should expect of Google and it’s a slippery slope that could penalize all sorts of similar pages as duplicate content just because they are about the same topic.
I would just report the site to Google as scraper spam, which I have reported many like you found, and then lose trust if they don’t deal with it appropriately.
December 7th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
There are some things I don’t like about it and some things I do like about it. I really get annoyed when these sites pop up, and nothing is done about it. The average Joe is out there working hard at getting a decent rank but is finding it hard.
There is a community I am apart of that will be launching in the new year. The website is http://www.trustrank.org
Go sign up and help build a community about the new Trust Rank ( please no google workers)
December 8th, 2006 at 1:25 am
Hey Bill, you seem to let Google off the hook yet plain as day Google is making a decent amount of money from this. It’s not under the radar…there’s a check flowing from Google to the owners of that site, and Google counts their pages as “available inventory” when it pitches potential advertisers.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:53 am
John, you seem to forget that even when Google boots them Yahoo and MSN still embrace those sites. I can tell you for certain that Google dumped a bunch of sites and sources of junk that Yahoo is still indexing at an ever increasing rapid pace. The major difference was Google responded to the spam reports and Yahoo didn’t.
Kind of hard to blame Google for not spotting sites that don’t want to be spotted. The problem is that the smarter junk sites and domain parks are working harder at eliminating and randomizing the fingerprints that make them easily detectable. You yourself once said “stealth is as stealth does” or something similar that sounded like a phrase from a fortune cookie.
The only thing I won’t let Google off the hook for is that they know when AdSense shows up on more than a handful of sites for a single account and it’s a clear signal of potential quality problems and they let it persist.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:56 am
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