Title: Recently, my service <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;next-episode.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;next-episode.net</a> experienced a huge drop in Google rankings. As I&#x27;ve been running it for more than 15 years, this is far from the first time this has happened. Usually I&#x27;ve been able to attribute big fluctuations (positive or negative) either to something I did, a Google algo change, or some external factor.<p>For example, about 2 years ago, something similar happened. While digging through my Search Console I discovered that Russian websites generated thousands of links pointing to a page on Next Episode with pornographic keywords used as link anchors. This was so effective that they managed to get those keywords to the top of the &quot;Top linking text&quot; in Google Search Console - naturally (most likely) resulting in drop in rankings for the regular keywords and the domain in general.<p>About a week ago, while trying to investigate the current drop in rankings and browsing through my &quot;Latest links&quot; external links export from Google Search Console, I noticed something funny. There were thousands of links in there (from 3 domains) following the same structure as on Next Episode: domain&#x2F;show-name domain&#x2F;show-name&#x2F;browse domain&#x2F;show-name&#x2F;season-1, etc.<p>Following these links revealed something even funnier: all of them displayed content directly from my site! Not even scraped&#x2F;cached content - they were dynamically pulling content from my server and displaying it on their domain. Even the search worked, the news archive and the top charts. Here is a list of those domains as an image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;PjNKh0b.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;PjNKh0b.png</a>. I&#x27;ve since blocked their access, so opening any of them will not show my website right now, but here is how it looked: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;HBiL3yh.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;HBiL3yh.png</a><p>Now, my first thought was that those were maybe scraping the content as part of a link farm (to spam with ads?), but I also wanted to know more. I experimented with Google searches that included pages from my website, like &quot;Hot Shows - Next Episode&quot; and ones with very specific news posts subjects like &quot;Streaming Services Availability added to Episodes and Movies&quot; (posted in September last year). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only the domains above were indexed by Google (and were listed in the Search results), but there were 4-5 more domains that did the same thing and some of them even outranked mine!<p>Here is a full list of domains that I discovered by searching for my news posts subjects: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dAm1CzI.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dAm1CzI.png</a>. If you Google for site:domain.com you&#x27;ll see some of them have thousands of pages indexed by Google. Trying out more keyword searches, I was also able to discover these domains: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;s5YjJWK.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;s5YjJWK.png</a> (as they&#x27;ve cached the content, they still work). Those all seem to be part of the same operation, but they serve a different purpose - they have only scraped the home page of Next Episode and all their links point to inside pages on the other domains. I suspect this is to generate incoming links to the other domains and give them some credibility.<p>As with the links with adult keywords text anchors mentioned above - I suspect this whole thing is a negative SEO campaign - I don&#x27;t see any other reason for it to be happening and it seems to be achieving its goal. Once I found all I could find about the domains involved in this, I took some action:<p>1) disavowed all those domains through the Google disavow tool<p>2) investigated if I could redirect their pages to mine (as they were dynamically pulling the content - I could change it to whatever I wanted). I managed to make it work through JavaScript (though interestingly, it had to be obfuscated as they were doing some sanitizing when pulling my content and replacing strings like &quot;window.location.href&quot; with &quot;window.loc1ion.href&quot;), but in the end I decided against it and:<p>3) I blocked their IPs through CloudFlare (all Russian IPs). An interesting thing here is that once I blocked an IP, the domain would somehow automatically switch to another IP to pull my content from, but once I blocked like 10 or 15 of them - they seem to have run out of IPs and now they stay blocked.<p>I looked for a way to report those domains to Google, but as of today, I&#x27;ve not found the place to do it. Does anybody know? Today, about a week after I blocked the domains that pulled content from my site, they still have thousands of my pages indexed in Google and are ranking better in some search results than me. I&#x27;m guessing with time, Google will catch up with the fact they don&#x27;t show any content anymore and will delist those pages.<p>This whole thing was very new to me so I hope it&#x27;ll raise awareness that this is going on and maybe help someone else catch it happening to their website. I&#x27;d appreciate any feedback on this and I&#x27;m around if you have any questions. It would also be interesting to hear about anyone&#x27;s related experiences. Cheers!
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