NB The following is a community-generated list of websites that republish Stack Exchange content without attributing it properly. It is no longer being maintained, because the procedure for reporting such sites has changed; see the duplicate for more information. There are a number of license-violating clones of Stack Exchange sites popping up that use Stack Exchange's  data without following our Creative Commons attribution terms. Those terms are , and are also included as a .txt file in every data dump we produce.  Google now has  in search results. Also, you can :  The option to block a site appears when you click a search result and then navigate back to the search results page. Click the &quot;Block&quot; link next to that result to block all pages within the site's entire domain.   This post was created as an attempt to organize information originally posted . You may also be looking for .
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of Stack Overflow, all content posted on Stack Exchange sites by their users (i.e. you wonderful people) has been provided to the whole universe under . For my fellow non-lawyers, that license basically means:   Anyone can use any Stack Exchange posts at any time without having to ask for permission Making money off of the copied content is permitted You don't even have to copy stuff from here verbatim; you can just use it as a starting point and make whatever edits you want There are just two rules you have to follow:   You have to provide . Simple links to the original post and author info are just fine. You have to  and allow other people to use your content, as long as they follow these very same rules. How meta!    (If you ever forget any of that, and want to refresh your memory, the license info is linked to in the footer of every page.)  There are, in fact, a lot of people who republish varying amounts of our content for assorted reasons. Unfortunately, there are some Stack Content Republishers Attributing Poorly and/or Excelling at Ranking (SCRAPERs, for short).  In this context, "attributing poorly" means any use that doesn't follow our attribution rules or make any other reasonable attempt at give credit. This can get pretty egregious; I've seen SCRAPERs that not only don't link back to SE originals, but also use fake author info and post dates to make it harder to find originals. By "excelling at ranking," I'm referring to copycat sites that end up higher in Google results than the original SE sites do for the same content. That's not necessarily wrong, but in some cases, it indicates inappropriate SEO hackery.  So, the question is: what can you do if you spot a SCRAPER?
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On Stack&nbsp;Overflow, I'm a pretty frequent contributor with over 3K in reputation. Almost all of which earned by answering real user questions about Windows programming and other topics.  Last night, somone posted a .  I knew the easiest thing to do would be to direct him to an appropriate documentation page on MSDN that I thought would help. And I literally did this:   Copied the URL directly into the post. Below the URL, copied two lines of content from that page that was relevant. Small code snippit below that.   Literally, this is what the answer looked like:           This warning is automatically promoted to an error. If you wish to   modify this behavior, use #pragma warning. For example, to make C4235   into a level 2 warning, use the following line of code  #pragma warning(2:4235)    I felt that by cutting and pasting a quote from the website, and attributing it with the URL was proper form. Such that it's not ambiguous where the answer originated from - both from a copyright perspective as well as a courteous to the content owner.  About an hour later, I observed two things:   One moderator downvoting the answer and flagging it because "Copy/pasting. Nice. Did you see "© 2011 Microsoft. All rights reserved" at the bottom of that page" Another moderator deleted it with just a link to the FAQ - which says nothing about cut and paste or copyright rules.   Well that was disappoining. It wasn't like I was pasting a writeup without giving credit to the original author. Just a small quote from a well known reference site.  So here's my questions:   What is the policy around answers coming from other online reference sources? Is pasting a URL to a page with an answer OK? Is pasting content from the URL OK?  Even if it's attributed? Is there a proper way to attribute content when it originates from another site? Is there a proper way to attribute an answer if it originates elsewhere? Was I wrong to paste a snippet of content from MSDN, or was I wronged by aggressive moderators?   Now here's the real kicker - my day job is a software engineer at Microsoft. I am certain that my employer would not take issue at all with me helping the Windows development community by referencing pages they publish. So in some sense, the Stack&nbsp;Overflow communinity is just making it harder for the Windows experts to help the Windows community. It seems odd.
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I block everything Google, including Google APIs, as I don't like to to have Google tracking all of my usage on the Internet. Is there any way to use Stack Exchange without Google APIs?  I usually am browsing with Windows 7 and Firefox, but of course not Firefox with StackExchange.
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My old site used to write the URLs without !.  Eg: www.example.com/#/products  But it has been more than 6 months since I changed it to include ! in the URL like so:  www.example.com/#!/products   But unfortunately Google search results still show my old URL schema.  There is no way I could enter in the Google Removal Tool (via their Webmaster Tools) to remove www.example.com/#/products since Google will complain about an invalid URL.  All I want is to remove www.example.com/#/products and Google to show the one with /#!/products in the results instead.
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We have recently discovered a host of spammy links pointing to our website been put up in last 1 month through webmaster tool We have not engaged any seo agency/link building and have never created these links  Worst, these are spammy forum sites and almost some-one seems making an attack to our site as the link and keyword is same in all these sites Till not Have not received any warning, however as it has come to our notice - before any SERP getting down - we want to action this out  One thing we have observed is that - All these spammy links points to a single inner page of website  Pl suggest as have   a) Will Google disvow tool will work by stating to disvow these links  or  b) Is it a good way if we make this specific page 'nofollow' and even 'noindex' The reasoning behind this is like if the page is not followed and not indexed - the negative links pointing to the page of the site is already no follow and may be out from google serp  or what's the best alternate way to tackle this. Pl suggest in urgent help and advise required
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Back when the first discussion about deleted questions came up, I  building an official unofficial read-only archive for good deleted SE content.  I had a plan to build something like this:    Each link would point to a 1:1 scraped StackOverflow (or other SE network) deleted question (of course with a big fat disclaimer to the top, historical data, legal stuff, yada yada yada - and of course after asking Stack Exchange for permission, seeing as this would go far beyond what the CC license allows.)   I also registered a domain name that would (IMO) suit nicely, overflown.org.  However, when thinking about it, I realized doing this properly is a lot of work. You would have to:   build a scraper that can use a 10k+er's OpenID to fetch the deleted question (using the API or the data dump is for wusses. If we go through all this trouble, we want a historical document of what the site looked like "back then", right?) edit the page's DOM to remove dynamic elements, remove the "deleted" CSS classes, remove all the voting abilities from the buttons, and add the "this is historical data" disclaimer fetch - this is the biggest part and applies even if you use the API or data dump - all linked image resources (even those from imgur - even images used only in deleted questions could be purged one day), store them, and link them fetch all associated CSS style sheets and store them intelligently - preferably in a way that you don't fetch a copy of each file for each page (as normal page scrapers do), but also in a way that doesn't break if SE update their style sheets   long story short, I won't be in a position to build this any time in the foreseeable future - with old work, new work, and studying, I really have enough on my plate already.  Of course, if somebody else in the community feels like giving this a try, cool! But what I was really thinking is - maybe this is something Stack Exchange should build after all?   I know Jeff's  on these questions is used to be     @system I did think about a sweet place for them, in the bitbucket. – Jeff Atwood♦ Dec 29 '10 at 1:54   but come on. Think about it:     Future deletion discussions and changes in on-topicness policy would become way more relaxed because the popular and loved stuff has a place to go. A site for "overflown" questions could be curated by selected community members, who decide whether a contribution deserves to be archived or not.  A separate domain name (I'm happy to donate overflown.org for the purpose if desired) and the separate site design would create enough distance to the Stack Exchange network: it would be crystal clear that this read-only archive is for historical purposes only, and the existence of a question there does not mean you can ask something similar on one of the live sites. The pages would be 1:1 scrapes of what the site looked like at the time of the scraping, making it a general historical archive as well. These questions traditionally drive a lot of traffic. The possibility of continuing to show ads in the usual places would allow Stack Exchange to take advantage of that traffic without endangering content quality on the SE network. Hosting an archive like this is a job for a business, not us regular joes. A private project hosted by some community member can go down once they forget to pay a bill, or decide they want to password protect their private blog or photo album. The ideal place to host a site like this is at a company with professional admins that intends to stay online for a long time.    How about it?
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Is it possible to configure Google somehow to permanently ban search results from domains that I know 100% are never, ever going to make me happy?  Something cookie/session based maybe?  E.g. I want to ban (permanently, forever and always) results from experts-exchange.com.  Every time I click results that take me to their page I just want to scream.    Update!  Google has released a Chrome Extension to allow users to block individual site from Google search results!  .  (Since this question has been closed, I cannot answer it.)
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Stack Exchange staff will actively remove links to a legal fund campaign from user profiles, posts, and comments, as well as community ads surrounding Monica's situation and reinstatement. Why?  [This post was originally posted by  but ownership was changed with a post-disassociation tool so that the accepted answer would be pinned to the top.]
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For example, in the past, links to www.example.com wouldn't have meant Google would pass any value to say, forum.example.com. What is the current status of this? (Please provide a reference if possible).
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I am building a new site, but creating the content using a subdirectory on an existing site. I have never posted a link to this subdirectory anywhere, yet searching Google reveals that Google has found these pages on my site and indexed them.  Further, I updated the site with a robots.txt file that WMT reports as being read, and testing the blocked pages using the WMT test tool indicates that the pages will not be indexed. Apparently this does not remove the pages from existing results, though I submitted a request to do so.  How did Google find these pages to begin with? Is it because I used a common subdirectory name and Google guesses at common subdirectories?
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There is a site of ill-repute known as thedirty which has completely mirrored my site and now has links appearing on Google at the #1 spot using my content.  I checked my log files and noticed that this site has been crawling mine for sometime, and also has 10,000 links from their site to mine.  I have blocked user access which is referred from this site and reported them as web spam to Google already.  I also disavowed the domain.  How are they getting top links in Google (even overtaking mine) for such nefarious tactics?  What are the steps to completely eliminating an issue such as this?  UPDATE 8/28/2014:  I thought I would provide an update on this as I have more information now.  So thedirty pointed their subdomains to my ip which had the effect of making their subdomains look like my website.    For a couple of days this didn't matter much because using htaccess, I redirected all HOSTS not of my domain, back to my domain which basically meant I was getting their subdomains traffic links on Google.  After a couple of days thedirty changed their subdomains to point back to their website so that I no longer benefit from this.  So the whole point being they used my content to get top ranks on Google, and are now pointing those links back to their website to drive more traffic to theirs.  It is a dirty tactic by a dirty website.  My hope is that Google punishes such behavior.
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Suppose a commercial organisation decided to create a Q&amp;A site that had the look and feel of Stack Overflow, calling itself Stocks&amp;sharesOverflow.com, with a logo inspired by, but sufficiently different from stackexchange.com.  A  stated that look and feel of a site isn't copyrightable, but what about modifying the name and logo of stackoverflow.com to maintain the same "feel"?
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There is . Is the site appropriate for stuff related to requesting frameworks and libraries? Or should we have another site for that (e.g. name it Frameworks Recommendations or stuff alike)?  I can ask stuff there like: I need a software satisfying W, X, Y, and Z, but I'd like -some day- ask like: I need a Python library satisfying W, X, Y, and Z. The audience may be (and perhaps will be) different.    Is that website on-topic for stuff like that? Or should we open another proposal for that?  No: It's not about asking for a giga-dump for subjectivish questions. The linked-to-dupe question was written and answered with an old mindset and without Software Recommendations in mind. Also it does not consider this specific kind of questions but all the crap in one place. So, no,  is not an appropriate dupe mark for this question.
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There's a very popular topic on Stack Overflow's Meta asking to . This was created because ImageShack deletes old images to free up server space, making images within older posts fail to load.  Unfortunately the situation is much worse than just deleting; it seems they're reusing old URLs for advertising purposes. In the post here about  I've just had to edit out the ImageShack images from  separate  because they've been reused as advertisements:        Can we block ImageShack across the entire Stack Exchange network?
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Since Quora just went public, I decided to have a look around and found certain topics like Gmail that contained questions that would be great for the Web Apps SE-site.  However, would it be considered plagiarism if I simply asked the same questions on the new site?  Edit: I would only look at the titles for an interesting question to ask, so if I write my own question body, it's not plagiarism in the real sense of the word. However, it's probably not really polite since if we are better indexed or have a better PageRank, we would steal some of their attention.  In response to Jeff's answer: how should I attribute to the sites? Simply mention I found this question on Quora and link to it?
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My feed shows questions from all SE sites, most of which are irrelevant to me.  I'm interested in physics, math, and programming, topics I find served well by the SE model.  There are many SE communities I have no interest in and even get annoyed when I see the kinds of questions and answers posted (ie, opinion based answers that are passed off as truths).    It would be much better if I could manually add each site I'd like to see questions from.
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I recently came across a question asking how   Included is both links to torrent sites, and direct links to "torrent download pages" for copyrighted content.  I took the liberty of turning them into non-links. So people wanting to answer the question could see the link structure, without SO actually linking to the pages in question.  The OP has since gone in and reinstated the links.  I feel I was correct, doing my bit to help clean up SO. I'm not a mod, so I can't enforce anything, and I don't want to start some sort of ping-pong editing battle removing these links just to have him put them back.  So what's the policy on links to links to pirate content? Should I be flagging this post for mod attention?