Black Hat SEO comes to Puna and Punaweb

[Bullwinkle]

We had to take offender to court and won after spending 100k$ - made case law

p*ssed away 100 grand to get a cease and desist to stop a couple of vandals.... yes I am biased

[kalakoa]

Extra page views for Punaweb means more traffic means Rob's hosting bill just went up.

In the olden days, we used to send rude pictures back to the referral; this is trivially expressed as a mod_rewrite in Apache, no need to hack up the forum software.

[Bullwinkle]

its about ranking - if the vandal is any good - they could have robs site on page three of the returns ... add just a few more key words to the imported content .... next you know you cant be found.

phase 2 is where they would take all the punaweb text - spin it through a program that rephrases the text into synonyms ...and repost on dozens of bogus sites - generating a false ranking

black hat has all but destroyed most search engines - google works on it 24-7 and we all wait at the trough for changes - to stay current

in this case the folks want to draw off folk looking for punaweb - to sell them a house - not to enlighten

now if its a clunker - its not much of a stretch to see punaweb included in any attempt to recover damages as they "endorsed" the broker

black hat sucks - not through a straw ....

[csgray]

I emailed Donna Herbst to express my concern and she replied that she has no idea how it got on her page, she seems genuinely at a loss for how it got there.


Carol

[Carey]

Another way to look at it, I am sure most of you realize that if Donna had imported an image of a mouse, like Mickey, that she would probably get a good dose of "Magic Kingdom" action... we all seem to realize that it is their way of protecting their creative efforts...

The same goes for most computer things...these are creative products... that includes websites, code, fonts....all sorts of things are covered as creative efforts & are protected under law...

At the university there are many kids that don't "get it" . They have grown up "borrowing" things off of the web... & they think nothing of using a licensed font on the PP presentations, then are bummed when they find that they are using a licensed font that is not allowed in some of their courses ... & their whole presentation is "off" because they hadn't checked whether they had the legal rights to use the fonts (or more to the point, that the university computers did not, and had blocks on the font style)...

ADD: I was typing this as Carol posted, ...even so, SOMEONE had to enter code on Donnas' site...& SOMEONE did not ask...and the site is Donnas' site...so hopefully SOMEONE will ask permission or take the embed down...

& hopefully Donna will be much less "creative" in using other peoples product & use the product she creates, has written permission to use, or pays for!

ADD@ - some do not feel that the COPYRIGHT that punaweb has is equal to a trademaerk....That thinking is not correct... there are legal ramifications to using each with out permission &/or licensing... Interesting to note that Donna's website KEPT the copyright visible, if you scroll down the embedded page - just did not RESPECT the copyright of the website...

And yes, plagiarism is a hot topic with me, as I have had my work used by others without permission or citation & it truly sucks to have your work so disrespected... and to have someone else take creds for the work you did...all you feel is completely disrespected & used.

[Bullwinkle]

standing by - lawyers, guns and money - some things never change .... the mainland dysfunction just takes a while to get here

Thailand looking better all the time - grin

[kander]

Hmm, This stuff happens all the time, as mentioned before its actually linked to the actual punaweb forum site inside a HTML frame. Not the same as using a trademarked image from Disney. I can pretty much guarantee that Donna did not put that on her page but the people who she paid to do her webpage did. ie Hawaii Website Design by Koa Consulting

Moving on...

[Bullwinkle]

doesnt look like koa to me - shall we check before tossing them under bus?

koa builds websites that users can configure - more likely this was done by the end user if one of their designs

good guys - they dont play dirty. Folks with skills can hijack a sites traffic and key words - discreetly - and yes black hat - reputable web folk dont play that - we have skin in the game ....this is amateur hour and backfired

- its a small web world - we dont foul our own nest - unlike some real estate sites

[Lee M-S]

Perhaps this thread should be renamed again to "Evil realtor steals Punaweb content"
then we keep bumping the thread so it appears at the top of her website.

><(((*> ~~~~ ><(("> ~~~~ ><'> ~~~~ >(>

[Bullwinkle]

well the offending page still up - doesnt speak of genuine concern - those extra hits can be like heroin to junky - hard to let go

manana