Proxy Servers Killing Your Site?

Posted At : July 4, 2007 8:11 PM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

There are sites hosted in countries out there which will scrape or cache your pages using proxy servers to store copies of those pages. Having copies of your pages available to search engines means that someone is going to suffer duplicate content penalties (loss of rankings) and for some very strange reason it appears that, particularly in Google, the original content is being penalised in favour of the proxy content. This not only destroys traffic levels and revenue streams but leads to further problems that as yet, there are no definitive solutions for.

950 Penalty

Since last year (2006) sites that previously ranked well for their main key phrases disappeared from the search engine results pages (SERPs) and only by digging really deep into the results have the sites been found languishing around the -950 mark. There are ways in which sites can recover from this which we'll cover at a later point but an excellent discussion on the 950 penalty can be found at webmasterworld.com.

Proxy Duplicate Content

Unfortunately there is no best way to deal with proxy duplicate content. There are a number of measures you can put in place to protect yourself. A common problem is the proxy server 'bots' will spoof their identity, identifying themselves as genuine search engine 'bots' and conducting reverse and forward DNS look ups prior to allowing access can combat this. But if you're not really concerned about traffic from the most common originating countries for proxy servers then you'd just as well ban IP ranges from countries such as China and Russia. Admittedly a more blanket effect, but a very positive solution none the less.

Content Hijacking

Content hijacking will always be part of the Internet. If you produce excellent work, others are always going to copy it and pass it off as their own - we know because it's happened to us. You're not usually aware of it until things go wrong and knowing how to recover and taking measures to stop it happening again is what's going to put your site back on top.