Lycos Retriever: stealing your search engine traffic?

Unique content is crucial to SEO. When another website copies / plagiarises your own unique content, it is not always obvious to search engines which site is copying the content of which. Especially when one site is big, the other not so big.

Lycos Retriever does exactly that. It copies content from other keyword rich sites like yours and mine, stealing traffic that the smaller sites might otherwise get.

My website clearly has a copyright © symbol on it, yet Lycos has chosen to ignore it. I'm horrified. It's completely out of order. I emailed them yesterday demanding they remove my text (and photos), but have yet to have a response.

I'll be very interested to hear your results. Are they not linking to your site/content?

Dan

They hadn't linked to my site - they just pinched the content. Well cheeky. It's been removed now, I'll be keeping an eye out for them in future...

Lycos Retriever doesn't steal anyone's content.

There is a link to every page from which content is excerpted on the left. Mousing over it shows the full URL and title. Different presentation, but essentially no different than Google. Well within Fair Use.

See, for example,King Kong
(1933): http://www.lycos.com/info/king-kong-1933.html,
Zoloft: http://www.lycos.com/info/zoloft.html,
Public-Key Cryptography:
http://www.lycos.com/info/public-key-cryptography.html ,
Lyme Disease: http://www.lycos.com/info/lyme-disease.html,
Reggaeton: http://www.lycos.com/info/reggaeton.html

18 months later, cheeky lycos is at it again, stealing content from my websites. Elihuvedder points out that they link to the sites they copy, but this is an indirect link (via hotbot). Completely out of order. I've emailed them again.

just block the IP address from your web server.

I can't beleive Ive just noticed this pile of crap website, it should be banned from search engines, its nothing more than a black hat seo scraper site.

I noticed that all their internal links are html but the links to other sites listed are unspiderable crap,

eg

http ......//click.hotbot.com/director.asp?site=www.lycos.com&partner=&start_group=retriever_topic&id=1&keys=&target=http://www.scrapedwebsitenamehere.com

so first the link out is to hotbot, then back to lycos then out to the site

Ive checked with some sites listed there and there is no backlink from lycos retriever, the link cant be spidered and they know it, this site was built by black hat seo experts, if it was my site it would have been banned from google by now, but just cos they have the name Lycos to make them look all respectable, just plain thieves, without any real ideas or innovations so just decide to steal other peoples content and traffic

BLIMEY - now when I read this again I can see more - lycos are actually black hat seo spammers - god !

Elihuvedder has joined and made one post on20th July just to link to his black hat scraper site, GOD,, how the mighty have fallen...Lycos - from tv adversiing multi million pound giant to black hat seo scraper sites.