UPDATE:  Vinolin has taken steps to remedy the problems that were caused.  If you feel your site is being affected by duplicate content, and would like an analysis, please visit our SEO Services Page.  Thanks!

I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but there is a website in the wine industry that claims to be an blog aggregator for the purpose of “content analysis”. Here is what they say about themselves – Vinolin’s justification for being thieves. To make matters funnier/worse, the layout of their site looks like a slight rip-off of cork’d's.

I noticed Vinolin was aggregating our content when I discovered this post on their site about a year ago. In all honesty, it didn’t really bother me all that much, as they were just displaying the excerpt, and I saw there was a back-link to our site.

Now… just take a look at this page: Vinolin’s Rip-Off of our last post. This link takes you to google’s cached version, I did this in the event they pull down the page after this article goes public. On this page, you see they didn’t limit themselves to an excerpt, they blatantly copied the entire post and displayed it on their site. The audacity is unbelievable, especially considering they are aware that people have a problem with it(as people should).

So, not only do I discover that they are stealing content from our site and others, but as an even further sign of disrespect, they have not managed their robots.txt file so as to keep those articles from being spidered by the search engines. For those of you who are unfamiliar with search engine optimization, most search engines exact a penalty for duplicate content. It is not uncommon that an original creator of content can lose page rank, and even their indexed version of a page if the spider crawls the the duplicate first. The fact that they are providing a back-link doesn’t help anything as they would lead you to believe, because they are not linking back to the original content, they are just linking back to the main page of (y)our site. (more…)