Dex Media, Dex Knows, Dex Digital - website scraping/duplication?

[Conor Treacy]

Hello Everyone,

Usually, I'm perfectly fine with Dex, and encourage our clients to get a listing. Normally not a problem (even though Dex changes the phone number so they can do their own call tracking etc some times).

Today, I had a phone call from a client saying that their website was being outranked by A listing on Dex Digital (dex-digital.com) in which they took a full copy of their website, changed out some text (with errors), and change the phone numbers to their 4 locations.

Landing on the page you can't tell the difference from their actual website and the new dex-digital incarnation (other than a 40px banner at the top of the page with blue text, but still doesn't mention Dex).

Scraping content, as we all know, can have negative effects on SEO, and I'd hope that Google and Bing ignore what Dex does, but the fact that Dex is outranking the client's REAL website is a problem as the specials and discounts they offer on their site change from week to week.

Certainly the "legality of site duplication" is something for her lawyers to discuss, but has anyone else gone down this road before?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hey Conor, frustrating situation but great topic of discussion.

I'll Tweet this in the AM and see if we can get you some feedback.

 

[timcapper]

First thing I would do is DMCA the buggers.

Then report to John Mueller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onNwqFa-e_s#t=1221 ( see around 20:20 ) and it may be passed to engineering team to take a closer look.

 

[Conor Treacy]

It looks like they've changed something this afternoon. Now it's showing data from within an iFrame. Wonder will this let it drop off the results page since they're no longer hosting the data and instead it's being pulled from the actual site.

I guess the owner of the business is having a blast ripping into people I'll update this again when I get more info.