Black Hat Scraping & Replicating Tons of Poker Sites

[Sebastian]

These guys,

>>>>>>//koti.mbnet.fi/wolfram/<<<<<<<

OK it appears they have an interesting application where they can render any website, and replace words selectively by modifying the URL.

However, they don't have a robots.txt and a ton of their rendered pages are getting cached. It seems they are scraping poker sites and rendering them for some reason.

Here are a few of the blatant site copies, THAT ARE CURRENTLY CACHED, and showing up as duplicate content in Google. One of my sites was hit by them, they copied everything including internal pages.

I'm not sure they are 100% malicious, it's either that or they are idiots.

Sky Poker.com => link to their copied & indexed page

Gamble.co.uk => link to their copied and duplicate content page

Europoker.com => their copied page

And pokerzeit.com..... the list goes on and on......

You might want to check if you're not in there.

Ugh... It doesn't seem easy to get a hold of them too.

Sebastian

[pokerextras]

How did they redirect all of your links to their copied version?

[Sebastian]

How did they redirect all of your links to their copied version?

I meant in the replicated site, they changed all the internal links to point to the copied version so they could decouple it completely from the original.

[zzpot]

Beware of the Finns, they will get you.

[Sebastian]

Beware of the Finns, they will get you.

Thanks for this...lol.

[zzpot]

Ok, not sure what they are trying to achieve?

[pokerextras]

I'm guessing that it's not an EXACT replica with your affiliate links intact?

[Sebastian]

Currently the affiliate links are broken on their site, I don't know what they are up too.

[zzpot]

as I said I have no idea what this is, but it does not look like anything other than an experiment? I mean that there nothing easier than scraping, is there?

[Sebastian]

Experiment or not, the result is the same.

The websites are replicated and the copies are cached, and show up for queries in Google.com.

But I agree that it could just be a couple of kids having fun, not realizing what they are doing.