Thieves of the Internet
How would you feel if your site started to rank after a couple of months working to get it there and then the next thing it just disapears into thin air never to be seen again.
One of our affiliates on Clickbank decided it is a good idea to copy our index page exactly as is add some javascript code for their affiliate link and save it as a page on their site, they even put their own copy at the bottom of the site saying copyright belongs to the author.
We found 3 pages like that on three different websites. I am not quite sure why they do that. We discovered this through Google Analytics crawler error pages. The link looks like this www.yourwebsite.com/x.oSrc and www.yourwebsite.com/x.osrc each link has 3 links to it from 3 different sites and those links leads to what looks exactly like an older version of our index page. So in effect Google sees 3 duplicate sites and that could be why our site is not ranking anymore.
When you go to these websites they have a long list of products they sell at the bottom of their page. Clicking on the links to other products we discovered they do this with all the products they sell - copy the vendor's site and add code to it for their affiliate link.
Here are the links to these sites. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Health and Fitness for example go to the vendors site and see they are exact duplicates of the vendors site.
Definitely not the way to go in affiliate marketing.
If they are straight copies and therefore potentially breaching copyright then it would be worth contacting their webhost. Here is what Ezine articles suggested to me I do about articles https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/wa_forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=85149 and what Hubpages asks you to do if there is copied material on their sitehttp://hubpages.com/faq/#copyright Everysite is different of course and it may depend on where the hosting is but you never know it might just get results. Roger