Am I being Neg SEO'd or what's up ?

[Frolo]

Hello Friends,

I have something strange happening to one of my site and I don't know if this is negative seo or what the hell.

If I Google my website name I can find a few websites (not much, I could spot less than 10) that show my blog rss feed in google results.

When I click on those results one of the 2 things happens:

1) I'm redirected to various porn website or scam offers
2) I find a page with a scam offer but no redirection. If I check the source code of this page I find one of my blog post with all links replaced by link pointing to the page I'm on.

I believe both of those techniques refers as cloaking although I have no specific knowledge about it so I could be wrong.

I first thought those pages were used by a spammer that wanted to copy my content instead of creating or spunning their own and ranking them by churn and burn techniques to make a quick cash through affiliate offers.
However none of those links have been blasted as far as ahrefs they even have 0 BL.
I'm kinda worried this is a neg attempt to damage my reputation by associating the brand name to shady websites.

Any advices of experienced members on the subject would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ThopHayt]

How are you being negative SEO'ed if you don't have any spammy links going to your site??? Being outranked for your website's name by other sites isn't negative SEO unless they did it by harming your site.

If those sites are cloaking, etc, etc, then Google will eventually catch them and hammer then theoretically.

Is there a reason why you aren't outranking them for your OWN name? Details...?

 

[Frolo]

Sorry if I wasn't clear let me try to explain better:

Those websites are not outranking me, far from it, they are on page 5+ on some long tail keyword. But they do present to the search engines my content.
I am actually wondering what is the point of those websites to cloak my content as they are obviously not making traffic for it.

I wanted to know I if it wasn't a way to damage my brand reputation as my niche is no way near connected to those kind of offers.

I might have worded it poorly but this is what I was looking for : Is having people using your content to cloak spammy affiliate offers hurting your ranking ?

I get from your answer that I'm paranoid and I shouldn't care as long as links aren't pointed directly to my site which is good to hear.

 

[Marc_L]

Sorry if I wasn't clear let me try to explain better:

Those websites are not outranking me, far from it, they are on page 5+ on some long tail keyword. But they do present to the search engines my content.
I am actually wondering what is the point of those websites to cloak my content as they are obviously not making traffic for it.

That isn't cloaking. They scraped your content for their site. Whether they are successful or not doesn't matter, that looks like what they are doing.

Have your rankings dipped at all?

 

[Frolo]

They actually aren't scrapping my content for their sites per say since when you click on the the link you never get to my content. You can sometime see it in page source code but most of the time the link redirect to an offer that doesn't even have my content on the page.

Ranking keep increasing at a slow and steady rate. It's more of a preemptive check as I know my main competitor is pretty agressive so I'm kind of extra cautious and trying to make sure he doesn't attack me in a sneaky way.

 

[ThopHayt]

Hmm, having content stolen is problematic. BUT... if your site is authoritative enough hopefully Google could realize that its yours and slap the copiers.

But you have no way of knowing what Google is thinking, so I see why you're concerned.

I have no solution or advice in your case, sorry mate. Best of luck.

 

[krinko25]

So they scrapping your content and ranking for long tails, then cloaking to an offer, I do similar stuff but with spun content, i dont see that as a neg seo, if your website is well stablish google will know you are the creator I Will not worry about that, to confirm is cloaking maybe you want to change your user agent and see what happens, if you want to be really safe just report it to google, i dont like to do that i dont want google Nose in my niche

 

[JamesConway]

most likely not being negged bro.. take a step back and analyze...

 

[VeyronXS]

They actually aren't scrapping my content for their sites per say since when you click on the the link you never get to my content. You can sometime see it in page source code but most of the time the link redirect to an offer that doesn't even have my content on the page.

Ranking keep increasing at a slow and steady rate. It's more of a preemptive check as I know my main competitor is pretty agressive so I'm kind of extra cautious and trying to make sure he doesn't attack me in a sneaky way.

Two possible reasons:
1) They manipulated your "Description" on their sites.
2) There is a possibility that they 'hack' G.'s source.

Look out for any loop holes in your site too, they are ready to pounce, anytime.

 

[Lamuks]

Two possible reasons:
1) They manipulated your "Description" on their sites.
2) There is a possibility that they 'hack' G.'s source.

Look out for any loop holes in your site too, they are ready to pounce, anytime.

G.'s source? What is that?

 

[Frolo]

So they scrapping your content and ranking for long tails, then cloaking to an offer, I do similar stuff but with spun content, i dont see that as a neg seo, if your website is well stablish google will know you are the creator I Will not worry about that, to confirm is cloaking maybe you want to change your user agent and see what happens, if you want to be really safe just report it to google, i dont like to do that i dont want google Nose in my niche

I believe this is what is happening as if I check Google chached version I can actually see me content.
Guess I will wait and see for the time being.
If ranking start to fall I will probably report those sites then. As long as they are not hurting me I don't care they are scrapping my content since they rank on pages 5+ when I'm on page 1.
Thanks for helping

 

[Sristy]

First thing that comes to mind is to get them to stop scraping. You can do that by manipulating your RSS feed. As if they are unable to scrape there is nothing to post for them.

 

[bawara00]

So long as they arent outranking you, you should be safe knowing you are credit for original content. And no this isnt neg seo.