Odd results from Copyscape. Cloaker?

When one of my pages does an oblivion drop for a fairly uncompetitive SERP, and stays dropped for more than a week, I usually use Copyscape to see if I am being hit with a duplicate content penalty.

Lately, a lot of my pages have been returning some odd results.

For example, if you check http://www.tech-faq.com/database-replication.shtml is Copyscape, you see that http://www.web-conferencing-infoandnewssite.com/video-conference-facilities.html copied my page. In the snippet, you can see almost my entire site menu.

OK -- clear copyright violation. Let's go look at that page!

Ahh... it looks as if my content has been removed. But has it really been removed?

No cache is available here. Nor is there a Google cache. Nor is there a cache at Archive.org. In fact, they are blocking Archive.org's ia_archiver in their robots.txt.

Is caching disabled in the HTTP headers? It doesn't look like it. So why isn't Google caching this web page?

Most likely -- cloaking!

So I use WannaBrowser to set my User-Agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" and check out the web page. Damn -- they are not using User-Agent cloaking.

If they are cloaking, which is my current theory, they are using IP based cloaking.

Unfortunately, with caching disabled, IP based cloaking is effectively impossible for me to check without being inside Googlebot's normal IP address range.

This site's whois information is also cloaked, so I can't see who the bad guy is:

This web site uses Google AdSense and clearly violates the AdSense ToS rule against black-hat SEO.

I could send an abuse report to Google AdSense and a spam report to Google. From prior experience, I am well aware that both of those reports to Google go unread.

I could also write the e-mail address in their cloaked domain registration. Writing to bad guys telling them that they are bad guys is, of course, a complete waste of time.

I could write their hosting company, which appears to be Pair, or their upstream, which appears to be Level3. Explaining IP-based cloaking to a help-desk person is another approach that is not likely to go far.

It does appear that black hats have the upper hand in the current SEO environment. In my younger days, I was certainly no angel. Perhaps it is time that I went to the closet and donned my own black hat once again.

 

Glad to see I'm not the only one who has this problem Great informative post as well might I add.

 

Damn, great post will!