When it comes to freshness of sites and indexing time, it appears to me that Google is the hands down winner – Especially when it comes to spidering deep links.
About 3 days ago I added another trap word to NoSlang.com, my Internet slang dictionary. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a “trap word” is simply a word that doesn’t exist but is added to a dictionary for the sole purpose of seeing if anybody is copying your material. I’ve got about 5 or 6 in the whole dictionary, and they’ve been very useful for spotting copycats.
I always hate being that asshole, but I’ve actually had 2 or 3 sites shut down at the web host level after their owners repeatedly ignored my requests to stop copying my shit.
After 3 days of having this word up there (on a page about 3 clicks deep) I can say that only Google shows results for the search term. This particular word is istwfn – an abbrevation for “I stole this word from noslang.com.”
Check it out: Google shows results. Yahoo, Ask, Live, A9, and even Altavista don’t show anything yet.
Note: these searches will probably all soon show this post due to it’s regularly fast indexing, but they still don’t show the noslang.com page.
I know Google’s had some recent criticism lately about freshness, but it looks like they’re on the right track.
I have experienced ‘theft’ and ‘plagiarism’ just like you did. I have always gone right to the webhost, and have the sites suspended. Your ‘trap word’ method would definitely help me find those copycats that have sneaked through the cracks. Thanks, Ryan.
Comment by Jeff — September 14, 2007 @ 10:53 am
You’re welcome Jeff. I’ve been using them for years, but I recently started thinking about them again after philipp’s post about trap streets in Google maps.
I should have probably mentioned that one up there. There’s some interesting comments in his post that say trival pursuit and many other companies do the same thing.
You can see how many people are copying my dictionary by searching for this term: mgiwjsdchmw
Comment by Ryan — September 14, 2007 @ 11:02 am