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Workfriendly Goes Offline

Started by Jonathan Bailey · 12 months ago

Safe-surfing site and “accidental scraper” Workfriendly is now offline after more than two years of pushing duplicate content into Google. ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • Mayank

    12 months ago

    You know what ?? I'm falling in love with your work... You always impress me with your work and the amount of good you are doing to the blogger community. Hats off to you.

    It's good to know that one of these websites got down and I wish that all these content scrapers get down or should be pulled down
    reply
  • Jonathan Bailey

    12 months ago

    Thank you very much for this. I do not know how much of an impact that my work had on the closure of Workfriendly but I know that, if nothing else, I helped make the Web a more hostile place for the site. Hopefully this one will either stay gone or make the needed modifications to avoid harming the Webmasters that it pulls content from.

    Thank you again for the praise!
    reply
  • David Bradley

    12 months ago

    Yep, definitely, a combined effort, but more than likely that someone served a direct cease & desist on their hosting company.

    David Bradley (with an e ;-)
    Sciencebase.com
    reply
  • Jonathan Bailey

    12 months ago

    I'm actually not sure about that. Back when the issue was "hot", several people tried just that but the problem was that WF didn't actually "host" anything on their site, it was just the front page and a script for converting other pages to the new format. The host had repeatedly said that there was nothing they could do. I have the old contact information, I might email them though and see what they have to say on it.

    I'm personally thinking that the admin just got frustrated and walked away...
    reply
  • MeiMei

    11 months ago

    I grant you that the meta tag issue and the extra indexed pages would cause more work and
    headache for search engines but truly and honestly i don't see the big deal about workFriendly.

    It really seems from the content in your article that the problems could be solved by inventing
    some new snippet of code on the search engines part.
    - if the search engines have too many indexed pages that are not correct it's the engines fault
    - if the search engine is listing original pages with broken links because of the overlay site
    it's the engine's fault.

    Based on those 2 points I think it's incorrect to force workFriendly to bear the burden of fixing
    all these errors. It's not their job to make any search engine's job easier.

    I loved it. I'm sad to see it go because I thought it was a great idea and fun.

    Perhaps there are better reasons for workFriendly to be taken down but these 2 points
    you have given do not seem well reasoned.

    If
    reply
  • Nate Tucker

    4 months ago

    "The site created problems, however, when it allowed search engines to index its modified pages, injecting many thousands of of pages worth of duplicate content into Google."
    you only need one "of" between "thousands" and "pages"
    Just an fyi.
    reply

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