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Originally Posted by NTSS
Anyway to prevent it?
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Not easily.
If they copy your copyrighted materials and/or brand names (without permission or license), technically, you may have a legitimate claim against 'them'. But actually stopping them (C&D with teeth) is very difficult.
The search engines are not very supportive of webmasters getting ripped off - only if you jump through a million hoops, and are willing to accept the risk of being charged a serious fee by the search engine if your claim does not stand up (many scrapers try to hide behind the 'fair use' clause of copyright laws), then you may be able to shut them down.
I have been successful at getting scrapers removed from search engines but the amount of work to do this is discouraging.
You may want to track the 'beneficiaries' of the scrapers and file complaints with them - sometimes a sponsor may not want to get into a trade dispute and they will cut the affiliate off. Many of the scrapers are actually Google ad program affiliates - google does have rules about using 'porn' to sell their ads and copyright violations.
On this board you will find many who use search engine 'black tactics' like (Class C IP farms, site owner spoofing, site scraping tools, etc) - all designed to steal the search engine traffic from those who actually offer the goods being promised in the listings.