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Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

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Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

#1

Post by rakjosh »

One of my competitors has been scrapping my site and providing service to their users without paying anything. And now they surpassed me on google ranking.

I've created a website which gets around 5K unique hits every day. It's a free service for users but I've to pay a monthly fee to a third party service provider.

Because my site is free for users and doesn't require users to register it's been very hard to keep up with this guy. If I change certain things, they counter it immediately and make it work. And they use several proxies to send the request, it's virtually impossible to block based on IP.

Please suggest, if there is anything I'm missing that can be done.

Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

#3

Post by rakjosh »

torrence4 wrote: post #2

This is a good article I've followed in the past. idk how helpful this is, you might have already gone through it. https://github.com/JonasCz/How-To-Prevent-Scraping

That was definitely a very good resource. I've gone through that and tried to implement as many things as I could.

Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

#4

Post by maxpupmax »

ideas:

1. Create content that can't be scraped. I'm not sure exactly what your "content" is in this case, but images can be watermarked, text can be given lots of references to your own brand and service, ect.

2. Submit legal requests to google to remove the content. Enough violations can get their domain blacklisted. I've done this successfully in the past for competitors using my trademark without permission to get it removed from Google. Ads. https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420

3. Talk to the hosting provider, if applicable. If someone is repeatedly breaking copyright law using their platform, they may have some incentive to stop providing hosting.

Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

#6

Post by PopeDotNinja »

Can you figure out how the person is scraping your site? If so, start putting in content that only shows up for that scraper, such as...

"this content was unabashedly stolen from "

...or maybe...

"my favorite movie is Mac & Me, check it out! https://youtu.be/vNjACYfQlbI"

Re: Ask HN: Dealing with a competitor who is scraping my content and ranking higher

#7

Post by kazinator »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #6

Can you figure out how the person is scraping your site? If so, start putting in content that only shows up for that scraper, such as... "this content was unabashedly stolen from " ...or maybe... "my favorite movie is Mac & Me, check it out! https://youtu.be/vNjACYfQlbI"

"this content was unabashedly stolen from *by on ".

Unless the content must be 100% static, you can embed the caller's IP address in it.

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