29 Jul 2009

I mentioned previously in My Sys-Con Nightmare that Sys-Con.com are spamming Google with duplicate content. Even I wasn't aware, however, of just how much duplicate content they were spewing on the Internets.

This morning, I wrote a little bit more Python to download their list of topics and editors. Each one of those topics and editors has its own subdomain on Sys-Con.com and every article is duplicated on every one of those subdomains.

So, on Sys-Con.com alone, there are 437 copies of every article. Ulitzer.com is basically a mirror of Sys-Con.com with different styling but the same content. So, across both domains, Sys-Con Media publishes 874 copies of every article in its system.

Ulitzer.com was delisted from Google but Sys-Con.com still shows up in search results. Surely having 437 copies of every article on their system contravenes the rules on duplicate content in Google's Terms and Conditions?

Once more, visually

So how does having 437 copies of an article look? Here are the copies of just one article by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice-President at Microsoft and a Sys-Con author:

And keep in mind that these are the links to just one article on Sys-Con.com. Every article on their system can be found at 437 different links on Sys-Con.com alone. (All links have rel="nofollow" on them to avoid giving Sys-Con and Google Juice.)

Update: And this is how all that duplicate content looks on Google: search Google for inurl:sys-con inurl:439215. There are 241 results returned for just that one Sys-Con.com article. In other words, Google has well and truly been spammed by Sys-Con.com.

Creative Commons LicenseThe Sys-Con.com publishes 437 copies of every article article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.

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Sys-Con.com publishes 437 copies of every article

7 Comments »

  1. SQL articles under Jainism and Holocaust Research Project categories. Brilliant.

    I would have thought duplicating content to misrepresent the true value of your site for purposes of ad revenue would be illegal.

    Kumar

  2. [...] I now know the full extend of the duplicate content on Sys-Con.com: they publish 437 copies of every article on the Sys-Con.com domain. Another 437 copies are published on the Ulitzer.com domain for a total of 872 copies of every [...]

    Aral Balkan - My Sys-Con Nightmare

  3. I found 18 more domains that they publish to. Posted about it on my blog: http://artjumble.com/blog/?p=75

    P.S. I tried to post the list here, but I am sure it got picked up as spam. 18 urls in a comment will never work!

    Steve Mathews

  4. go aral!!! go!!!

    dominick accattato

  5. They clearly employ some very unethical developers and project staff who have nothing better to do than to think up and implement new subdomains. This seems to mimic very well the “hacker” mentality of some of their publications so is no real surprise.

    It should be something of concern to search machines such as Google however – and a reason to block all sysCON sites permanently.

    Robert

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