Blog

Dealing With Duplicate Content Negative SEO (DMCA!)

For the last year and a half, I have been “working” on one of my largest sites. It has passed over half a million words and started off as a no link building experiment. I use the word “working” loosely as for about half a year I have been focusing on other projects. Despite not having much time to focus on this project, it has been slowly ranking, and making more and more money every month.

Every once in a while, I take a look at Ahrefs and check out the backlink profile to see if I have gotten any more organic links. A week or two ago I noticed something strange. What I saw was a site that I had never heard of or seen before so of course I visited the URL to see what they were all about.

What I saw though was a bit of a shock and something I have not dealt with before. The site in question “linking back to me” was a 100% clone of my website! Same template, same link structure, same header, same everything! The really weird thing is that all the affiliate links were still carrying my affiliate code. What then would be the point of them doing this? My best guess at this point is an attempt at negative SEO by duplicate content.

What Has Happened To Date

The first thing I did was try and find out who was doing this. If this is happening to you, the easiest way to do this is run a whois querry on the domain. You can do this here: http://whois.domaintools.com/.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the website is being routed through Cloudflare. Cloudflare is essentially a proxy to the webhost so right off the bat, I was a bit stuck. Since they also have privacy on the domain, I was not able to see who had registered it.

The next thing I did was immediately check Google to see if any of the results were indexed. You can do this by typing this into the search bar: Site:http://sitename.com. This should show all URLs that Google has indexed.

Dammit! While they only have 81 results indexed, and my site has around 500 articles, this is still not good. Duplicate content is indexed. My site gets indexed almost immediately, so I was wondering how it was possible they were getting MY content indexed on “their” site. I then ran the domain through Semrush.

Well, that would explain it then! They have spammed their website in order to get it indexed.

The last thing I had to figure out is if they simply copied my website by hand or if they were just proxying to my domain. To test this, I simply made an edit on one of my articles to see if it immediately showed up on the clone website. It did! I have never dealt with this before, so I knew my first steps were filing DMCA notices.

Filing the DMCA

Since this clone site is using Cloudflare, I needed to find out where the site is actually hosted. To do this, you need to fill out Cloudflare’s abuse page. That can be found here: https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form. This should have them respond to you rather quickly and give you the information of the host. You can see their response below.

So with that filled out, I then moved on. When you do a whois on the domain, even though the information we really want is hidden, I was able to see that the domain name registrar was namesilo. I then filed a complaint with them here: https://www.namesilo.com/report_abuse.php.

With that being done, and waiting to hear back from namesilo (I already found the host from the cloudflare email above), it was time to write a DMCA. Believe it or not, in the last 4-5 years of doing online marketing, I have never sent one of these to another website so I had to do a bit of research. Below is the DMCA template that I used found at ipwatchdog.com.

Sample DMCA

My name is INSERT NAME and I am the INSERT TITLE of INSERT COMPANY NAME. A website that your company hosts (according to WHOIS information) is infringing on at least one copyright owned by my company.

An article was copied onto your servers without permission. The original ARTICLE/PHOTO, to which we own the exclusive copyrights, can be found at:

PROVIDE WEBSITE URL

The unauthorized and infringing copy can be found at:

PROVIDE WEBSITE URL

This letter is official notification under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”), and I seek the removal of the aforementioned infringing material from your servers. I request that you immediately notify the infringer of this notice and inform them of their duty to remove the infringing material immediately, and notify them to cease any further posting of infringing material to your server in the future.

Please also be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to remove or disable access to the infringing materials upon receiving this notice. Under US law a service provider, such as yourself, enjoys immunity from a copyright lawsuit provided that you act with deliberate speed to investigate and rectify ongoing copyright infringement. If service providers do not investigate and remove or disable the infringing material this immunity is lost. Therefore, in order for you to remain immune from a copyright infringement action you will need to investigate and ultimately remove or otherwise disable the infringing material from your servers with all due speed should the direct infringer, your client, not comply immediately.

I am providing this notice in good faith and with the reasonable belief that rights my company owns are being infringed. Under penalty of perjury I certify that the information contained in the notification is both true and accurate, and I have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright(s) involved.

Should you wish to discuss this with me please contact me directly.

Thank you.

/s/YOUR NAME

Address
City, State Zip
Phone
E-mail

Now that you have your new DMCA filled out, it is time to send them out. I sent this to the host, and moved on to the next step.

Asking Google To Remove Indexed Results

Now that I had sent the DMCA to the host, it was time to try and get this deindexed so I will not face possible duplicate content in the future.

First visit this page: https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en#ts=1115655.

Click on “I have a legal issue that is not mentioned above” and then “I have found content that may violate my copyright” and follow the directions to fill out the form. I copied and pasted the DMCA notice here.

Once I had everything filled out, it was just a waiting game to get emails back.

Things Get Weird

Then things start to get weird. Remember the DMCA I sent to the webhost listed in the Cloudflare email? Well, that bounced right back to me! I will be the first person to say I know next to nothing about how servers work. I am good with content and making money, but I have no idea how this proxy thing works. I recently moved this site to an unmanaged VPS that I have a good friend managing for me. We were both confused as to why this bounced back to us at first.

Then, Google responds…

What the hell?

Not really sure what they were getting at, I send them this as a response:

Surely that should take care of it right? I have friends who own software/plugins who send these out on the daily and Google is always removing results for them without question. Why would this be a problem? Then they responded again!

At this point, I am just lost for words. This entire clone site has been running for almost a month now, has 81 pages of indexed content, and they are unable to locate it? I know Google is known for their piss poor customer service in all aspects of their company unless you have an incredibly large ad spend on adwords, but really?

Wrapping It Up

I started Passive Marketing with the hopes to keep it real and share my wins as well as my failures with the internet marketing community. So here it is! This issue is still unresolved and I am at a loss of what to do moving forward. If anyone has any ideas how to deal with this, drop a comment and let me know!

Until then, keep at it!

August 18, 2016
Making It Rain On Prime Day! The Easiest $1,000+ Day I Know

Amazon Holidays are some of the best days as an internet marketer. Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday to mention a few. Each one sees an insane uptick in traffic, increased conversion rate, and overall buyers party putting money into my pocket. This Prime Day I saw a 10X increase in organic earnings (without using this method), and a 300% increase in shirt sales through Merch (organic as well).

So how much money did you make on Prime Day? $100? $500? Did you break at least $1,000? If not, why not?

Perhaps you might be in shock, “But Neil, my site is still small! It is just 10 pages. How could I possibly break $1k in a single day?”. To those of you thinking this, stop for a second and ask yourself if you prepared for this day. Should you have?

If you did or didn’t, I am about to share with you how myself, and a few friends make extra money on these Amazon holidays. I stumbled into this when I had a 20 page site a few years ago and was desperate for some extra money to invest. Let’s get to the setup and then the out of the box thinking!

The Set Up

Remember all those times that people have told you that content is king? Or the times that it was drilled in your head that you need to provide value to your readers? NOT TODAY! Today, we are throwing all that out the window. To get this to work, you need to keep it simple and to the point. Lets Do it.

Step One

The first thing you want to do is research what type of deals are going to be out on the Amazon Holiday you are preparing for. Amazon will typically send you emails telling you what will be on sale, or allow you as an Amazon associate to see the deals before they are released. If this is the case, make a list of EVERYTHING about to be on sale. Not just the products in your niche, but every little thing. When it comes to Prime day were thousands of products were for sale, you can simply pick a list of 100 items.

Step Two

Order your list of items for sale based on how close they resemble your niche. Lets say that you have a site in the Baby niche. The first items in your list would be baby items that are being discounted. After you have all the baby items listed, you need to start listing the next most relevant items. If I had a baby niche site, my next few items after baby would probably be Women’s clothing (because people who have babies are usually changing sizes). After that I might add some fitness deals (because mothers are often times trying to get back into shape). Then from there I may go into kitchen deals so on and so forth down the line.

Step Three

Open up your WordPress site and start a new post. Pop your list in there and make it look nice. I usually add a very small picture or perhaps an intro paragraph on top. Keep this as brief as possible as you want as many of your items above the fold as possible. Once your list is laid out properly with headings separating the niches, add all your affiliate links. Your page should have the similar set up to the image below. Notice how all there is to look at is affiliate links? No “great” content anywhere on the page.

Step Four

If you have created this page a few days before the Amazon holiday goes live, do NOT publish it yet. Save it as a draft. However, if you are extremely lazy, create this page as soon as you get up on the Amazon Holiday and you can publish it immediately. Keep in mind that this page will only be up for the single day that Amazon is running a promotion. You will not be ranking for it and you will be deleting the post. The post should ONLY go live the day that Amazon runs the deal.

Time To Make Money! Here We Go!

So you have your page set up and ready to go. All your affiliate links added, and if you have gotten this far, and probably asking yourself what the hell you just did and why?

You are going to leverage a specific social network. Can you guess which one? If you have read this blog at all, you know that I enjoy Reddit and have been there long enough to know how it works and how the users behave.

You see, the thing with Reddit traffic is that almost everyone who has tried to “game” their users before has been shot down in a ball of flames and cried that the traffic is terrrible, doesn’t convert, and is overall a waste of time. This is true on some respects, but is completely and utterly false on Amazon holidays. Why? Because most redditors are in the age demographic that does most of their shopping online and when Amazon runs these huge promotions, they are all over them. Think of a kid in a candy store, this is exactly what they are. All you need to do is get them over to Amazon and they will shop and shop. What normally would be downvoted into oblivion is suddenly upvoted to the top with ease.

Step One

If you are familiar with Reddit at all, you know that it is broken down into sub communities called subreddits. Each one of these is based on a certain topic or hobby. Take our baby niche for example above. You could check out reddit.com/r/babies but notice that there is only around 2000 readers there. Instead, lets take a look at reddit.com/r/mommit. This one has almost 22.5k users and this is certainly enough to make some really good money with. Find about 3-5 different subreddits that relate to your niche and write them down and keep them handy for the morning.

Step Two

You need to time when its best to submit your post to the subreddits of your choosing. Some of the subs will allow you to post direct links to your site, while others will force you to write text (and you include a link within the text). The secret here is to find out if you can submit it when the peak amounts of traffic will be hitting the site. I have found that mornings, lunch time, and right after work are the highest opportunities to cash in. If at all possible, you want to be submitting your post before people get in their car to go to work. This way, people will be reading it and upvoting it (so your post shows up at the top of the page). When your post is at the top, hopefully the upvotes will last long enough that both the lunch and after work crowd both get to see your post.

Step Three

Do the above for the subreddits you have found relating to your niche. Be careful to stagger them out or use different accounts than your main accounts. Sometimes, if you are submitting too much from the same site, you will get thrown into the spam filter. Slow and steady with submitting them on multiple subs. Remember, you are not spamming them, you are providing the easiest way for these users to find the best deals that pertain to them.

Step Four

Now that you know all the steps, lets discuss the one secret that you need to keep in mind to make all of this work properly. You need upvotes on your post to rank, and you need to rank to be at the top of the subreddit you pick, and you need to be at the top of the sub to make money right? Well, you need to get upvotes. You could submit and just hope that you get those initial upvotes that are so crucial. Or, you could make it happen. You want to make money right? Go find 5-10 friends (you do have some of those right?) that have accounts and ask them to upvote your post. ATTENTION: The only way to properly do this is to have them first navigate to the subreddit you submitted the post on, find it, and then upvote it. If you skip this step, each upvote will automatically be met with a downvote and your post will not move anywhere. This is a spam filter that Reddit has put in place that is not that hard to get around if you have done this a time or two before.

Step Five

Sit back and enjoy the insane traffic spike, the huge click through rate on your affiliate links, and the incredible conversion rates and people buy anything and everything that Amazon has on discount that day.

Tip: Make sure your hosting is up for the task. If you pull this off correctly you will easily see, 10, 15, 30, even 50k visitors that day during the spike.

Scaling The Method Up

If you are wondering if there is any way to scale this up, you need to think harder. Of course there is. You already have a list of 100 links in order for your specific niche right? There are hundreds of thousands of people on social networks. Rework the order of your list for other niches and resubmit it to other subreddits.

This really only works if you have multiple sites in different niches as well as multiple Reddit accounts to submit the content with. However, you could give it a try on the same site if you want to be really risky. I would not recommend it because you are not trying to spam, you are actually trying to be helpful here.

Wrapping It Up

This is hands down, without a doubt, the easiest ways to make a thousand dollars in a single day that I know. This can be done at any level, with any type of site. Even if you have a 5 pager and you just started your website, you can take advantage of this method the next time one of the Amazon holidays comes up. This is a great way to put some extra money aside, put some more money down on your mortgage, or simply gain a few more dollars to invest to grow your site.

Until next time, keep pushing forward.

Neil

July 13, 2016
Merch By Amazon Update – Hitting 2016 Goals

No one has purchased my example shirt on Amazon yet. Why not you?

I have some down time today so I thought I would finally come and write an update to one of the goals I set at the beginning of the year.

Right after the new year, on January 2nd, I released my first post on Passive Marketing about some of the goals I wanted to hit this year. I wanted to cut down on the projects I was working on and focus on just the core money makers.

Merch by Amazon was a very new side project to me at that point. I mentioned in the post that I only had 17 shirts uploaded but that I would release a guide on the subject, which I did near the end of the month.

That post became pretty popular (even though Amazon had locked down the service and now required you to apply and be accepted). It even got a mention on the Merch Forums, where I received my first negative feedback as seen below.

If this guy had actually read the article, I showed everyone how they could find designs on Amazon that were selling, and use that as Inspiration to create something better.

None of that really matters though. After reading my guide, two online friends took it to heart and started grinding hard. They are both now making thousands of dollars a month through their T-Shirt business and have both surpassed me in the amount of designs they have uploaded.

The guy above can pound sand.

My Merch By Amazon Update – Smashing Goals!

So, as a side project that I am spending only a few hours on each week, I thought it would take me at least till the end of the year to hit my goal of $4,000 per month. Why $4,000? I figured at that figure, it will be enough to sell the business and purchase my first rental property (which is also in my 2016 goals).

When I wrote my original post, you can see my first screenshot of 25 designs live and 100 slots available for upload.

That was ALMOST 6 months ago on the dot. Here are how many I have live today and slots available.

As you can see I have been tiered up multiple times, have 416 designs live (50 more sitting in my inbox to upload), and 2000 spots total. I have a LOT of room to grow.

What About Earnings?

When I first started with this program, I tiered up fast. I was one of the first people to get in, but I also had some simple designs that were selling well. I do not have a screenshot of the first few months, but I CAN show you what my first 4 months looked like right before I created my original guide.

Pretty pathetic huh? Like I said, this was, and remains a side project for me. It was not until I wrote the guide that my earnings started to take off from designs I had done myself. Up until that point, there was zero investment.

Things turned around quickly when I hired a designer, and here is what I am at today.

Boom, hit my goal 6 months early!

Lessons Learned

Apply Early!

The biggest downside about getting started with Merch is actually getting an account. Amazon clearly had no idea how popular this program would be and quickly turned it into an invite only program only a few weeks after it opened. Currently you need to apply to be accepted and the wait times are now 3-4 months or LONGER. If you do not have an account and are interested in getting started, apply now, do not wait. It only takes about 30 seconds anyway.

Outsource When You Can Afford It

As this is a side project for me, I knew that I would not be able to sit down and create designs all day with Photoshop. I am terrible at that program and have limited knowledge.

That being said, I do not recommend hiring a designer as soon as you are accepted for an account. You can create text designs and use free vectors like I mentioned in my original Merch guide. The way I have done it, is allow the account to pay for itself. If I make $50 dollars with my first few designs, I will assign that $50 to a designer and no more. That way, it stays a zero sum game and you never lose any money!

When you decide you are ready to outsource, I highly recommend looking on Upwork.

Choose Your Designer Wisely

One of the biggest issues on Merch right now is copyright infringement. If you upload a shirt with stolen upwork, or infringe on a patent or copyright, you may get away with it for a little while but eventually Amazon will find out and remove your listings. Get enough listings removed and you may just lose your account and all the work you put into it. You don’t want that right?

Pro Tip: When you are vetting designers, send them 3-4 designs that you would like to get created. I usually send them links of shirts I like and that I want them to use as inspiration to create something completely different but in the same niche. In those 3-4 designs, I will include a link to a shirt that is CLEARLY copyright protected. I will then inform the graphic designer that they need to ensure that everything they give me is both unique and does not infringe on anyone else’s work. If they come back to you and give you the same design, or do not change it enough where it would be infringement, I let the artist know their mistake, and immediately terminate them.

When you find a graphic artist that understands how to be creative and consistently provides you amazing designs, stick with them!

Focus On Evergreen Niches

Let’s be honest for a second. You could chase niches that exploding currently. I am not saying that this is a bad idea, but it depends on what your goals are for. Getting a viral shirt is a great way to boost earnings. However, if you only have limited spots, focus on more evergreen niches when it comes to T-shirt designs. These are going to sell year round, and will not die down in a week or two like a viral shirt would.

If you have thousands of spots available, you can play around with this and chase both viral designs, and evergreen content. I wanted my account to contentiously make good money without bouncing up and down so I went into every niche that I could find.

Quality AND Quantity

You know what kind of designs are going to keep selling year end and year out? Quality designs, that’s what. However, if you want to make real progress with Merch, you need to upload and upload FAST. Take advantage of the invite system and be first to market.

To give you an idea, a friend that read my guide when I first posted it got accepted and focused extremely hard on the designs. He is nearing 1,000 designs uploaded whereas I am sitting at less than half of that. You have to be willing to do what it takes to hit your goals.

Big News!

I have some huge news regarding Merch and how I can help you reach some insane numbers in under 6 months coming out very soon. Probably the next post I will do will be revealing some quality value without selling you anything. If you are interested in knowing when that is coming out, make sure you hope on my email list below. Anyone on the list knows I barely email you at all, but I usually have something interesting to say.

Enter Your Name and Email Below and Click

Just wanted to update you guys on one of my goals.

Keep pushing forward and killing it! Until next time.

June 4, 2016

Your cart (items: 0)

Products in cart
Product	Details	Total
	Available on backorder Previous price: Discounted price:	Save