Comments on: How I Hijacked Rand Fishkin’s Blog

By: Nazito Naz

Nazito Naz — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 04:29:00 +0000

I think the internal linking made it possible.

By: Jeco Senjaya

Jeco Senjaya — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:30:00 +0000

This is interesting. The possibility of Hijacking other’s reputation with a higher PR links flow to fake page. Means the small businesses which have smaller PR (PR 3 – 4) are easier to become target of irresponsible people. There should be a way to protect these smaller sites.

By: Lyndon NA

Lyndon NA — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:27:00 +0000

Really? I will have to look into that – as that would be impressive!

By: Emmett Smith

Emmett Smith — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 10:57:00 +0000

Dan,
I am very impressed at the effort you put into this experiment. How did you calculate the real-time pagerank for the subdomains? At the time of the experiment did you or the owners of the sites know that you could view their link profile in GMT?

By: Jignesh R

Jignesh R — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 09:54:00 +0000

Brilliant! I will note it and use it as reference always! Thank you.

By: JR Oakes

JR Oakes — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:14:00 +0000

So, I followed up with a test using a couple of Press Releases through PRweb.

When the content is placed on the site first (using pubsubhubbub) then the original site gets credit for the content over PRWeb (and other channels). It is interesting though that when searching for different exact strings within the article that sometimes it returns PRWeb and sometimes it returns the article on our site.

On another site that has pubsubhubbub and Google authorship the all the exact strings return our site’s article over PRWeb and their channels.

By: igestalten

igestalten — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:47:00 +0000

… but your site is still ranking high – so what did they exactly complain about? Copying content?

By: Seppo Puusa

Seppo Puusa — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:43:00 +0000

Interesting and more than little scary results. I can see how this would arm blackhat spammers.

You mentioned that the links to duplicate content get transferred to the original webpage. This raises an obvious Penguin-related question. What prevents a malicious person from scraping your site on a low PR domain and then spamming the duplicate domain with truckloads of bad links.

I would hope that Google has some fail-safes to prevent abuse like that, but the algo updates in the past year have really shaken my confidence in the big G.

What do you think about this?

By: JR Oakes

JR Oakes — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:56:00 +0000

LOL, That is hilarious. Did you tell them what you were doing?

By: Andy Francos

Andy Francos — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:48:00 +0000

Dan. Congratulations on an extremely informative and useful blog for SEOs. I’ve done a lot of work on geo targeting and duplication of content, so I fully respect and appreciate the effort you’ve gone to with this blog.

On the ‘interesting observation’ part, I too noticed that Tweets and likes were be assigned to the duplicate copy that should be attributed to the original copy. Again, great insight.