Hi all this is a question I am worried about and am sure it will effect
other webmasters

A number of pages on a site are not indexed by big G so what happens if
you make major changes to the page and G still does not index page and
a rat or 3 comes along and copies all your hard work !! if G then
indexes the rats page first will that mean your original will be
considered duplicate and all the hard work goes to waste.

I also have one further question relating to this.

Re-inclusion requests automattically require you to plead guilty to
something , but if you do not think you have done something wrong what
are you supposed to do??

steve

Hi Steve
Yes, that is theoretically a big issue.

However, over time *your* site will gain value while the scrapers site
will drop or get dumped (replaced). If your site is good and you
publish good, original content, then even if you do not get direct
traffic from Google's search results it will continually gain value.
You might have one link now, but you'll have 100 by easter, perhaps 200
by end of next year (just making up the numbers). A scraper might have
10 high-value links now, but be gone by easter. The next scraper might
still have enough to beat your 100 at easter, but he'll be gone soon
enough.

Unless you give up and let your site "die" then it will gain value. If
it doesn't gain value, you might want to re-evaluate why that is so -
are you perhaps doing something "wrong"? Do your visitors want
something else? Are you even targeting the right visitors?

Yes, for the reinclusion request you have to "admit" to something. Pick
something simple and write a good, short, to-the-point text about the
problem which you see. Don't overwhelm them and don't resubmit weekly.

John

Hi Steve,

Although you can use the DMCA procedure against the rat for infringing
your copyright there is the issue of how do you prove you were the
original author if Google have not indexed your page's contents first.
(Assuming Copyscape and the other SE's have similarly not yet indexed
it) Softplus advice is good if Google can check the dates the content
was submitted but i would query if they have the resources to do this.
The difficulty is you do not have access to those submission records
(unless you want to spend a fortune on court subpoenas etc) so I assume
the only way is to rely on Google checking themselves. In all other
respects the burden will be on you to prove you were the original
author of that work. For this you have to rely on the evidence required
by internationally recognized copyright laws which is one of the
reasons why more and more web-masters are sending the DMCA notices to
Google instead of the infringer (not to metion the problems of tracking
down the infringer).
Whatever course you take you must be 100% certain you have enough
evidence to support your claim, particularly as its unsafe to rely on
site/content submission dates alone (even more so where the rat
uploaded your content to an already established page) otherwise i am
afraid the rat could counterclaim against you if you fail to prove your
case.

At the moment, one of the only ways you can prove your content's age is
by printing it out and sending it to yourself via registered mail.
Don't open the envelope, make sure the postal stamp is well readable.
You can also do something similar with a few online services, but it's
usually not worth the additional trouble (unless you put a novel online
:-)).

However, who realistically does this kind of thing in advance?

One thing you can do which might not be worth just as much in court
would be to use a service like browsershots.org to take an online
screenshot of your page (and check for cross-browser compatibility
while you're at it :-)). It won't stay online forever, however.

In court, I doubt that even Googles records would be accepted as proof.
If the scraper can beat you to the index, you could beat the scraper as
well -- and then the scraper could still claim that you copied his
site. The only thing that often works is that you can prove that you
had the content online before he registered his domain (which is often
the case, as scraper sites tend to have a short lifetime).

Silverstall's advice that your proof of content ownership has to be
100% if you go to court is very important. Without preparation before
it happens, you might not be able to have 100% proof when it comes to
it. If your content is very unique and if it is important that it is
only shown on your site, then it makes sense to prepare for that (print
+ post it). If your content is just something you hammered out over
lunch, then you might want to just hope for the best and instead of
spending too much time on protecting everything, spend more time
promoting your website online to make sure that it is indexed quickly
and that people know in advance that it's *your content*.

All of this of course matters even more if you have a blog or if you
are otherwise syndicating your content: scrapers could just download
your feed and publish it directly (and many do). If you're syndicating
your content I would strongly suggest that you only syndicate a
"snippet", that you include a short copyright statement (perhaps with
date) and of course a link to your original content online. If scrapers
still grab your feed, they'll be publishing all of that as well :-).
Don't make it too easy for them - visitors will still view your site if
they are interested after the snippet.

John

Hi Guys, When the page gets indexed does the page gets recached too. I
have a very old cached on my site thats not even similar to the one
now. Whats wrong with google?
Regards
Charlie3