Duplicate Content Exploit
SiteProNews has an article about a Duplicate Content Exploit that is making the rounds. It gives blackhat SEO weenies a way to knock their competitors out of Google Ranking by duplicating their site, doing some SEO optimization on it, and showing it through a proxy server so that there is little hope of getting it taken down. There are spiders that are designed for the sole purpose of snagging complete contents of a site for this purpose.
The solution seems to be either block the “bad spiders”, which could be hard to do since they won’t follow the robots.txt protocol or .htaccess directives. Or, according to the article, “This is currently the best solution available, and applies if you are running a PHP or ASP based website: you set ALL pages robot meta tags to noindex and nofollow, then you implement a PHP or ASP script on each page that checks for valid spiders from the major search engines, and if so, resets the robot meta tags to index and follow. The important distinction here is that it’s easier to validate a real spider, and to discount a spider that’s trying to spoof you, because the major search engines publish processes and procedures to do this, including IP lookups and the like.”
Technorati Tags: SEO Exploit, Duplicate Content Exploit, Black Hat SEO Defense
