Are Your Error Pages Office2003blue?
January 25th, 2008 · by David Bradley
Do you ever see strange 404 missing page errors in your weblogs or your Google Webmaster Tools diagnostics page. These pages often contain the term “office2003blue” stuck in between a URL and an address for a page on your site. More often than not the URL in question begins “workfriendly.net…” and therein lies the clue as to the origin and perhaps the solution to the problem. It could be that someone is trying to disguise your site from prying boss’ eyes while they’re reading it at work!
Problem, you say? Yes! If Google Webmaster Tools is seeing sometimes hundreds of 404 errors that are purportedly being caused by your site then that is not a good thing, as errors don’t mean prizes, they mean down-ranking.
It turns out that, workfriendly as its name perhaps suggests is a site that will scrape any website you enter into it and refresh the page so that it looks like, you guessed it, an Office 2003 page. Apparently, you can have it in blue or silver, blue is the default, hence the Office2003blue in the middle of those error messages. The end results is an (almost) fully functioning version of any given page that looks more like an Office document than a website (images are hidden, formating is ignored, but links are still active). It’s almost the ultimate in the old “Boss key” applications some people used to have on their ancient MS-DOS PCs in the good old days before the web.
Anyway, a typical link might look like this:
"http//workfriendly.net/browse/Office2003Blue/http/ www.yahoo.com//r/sx/*-http://search.yahoo.com/search"
You could even add a script to your on site to make it default to this style and presumably save those pages and re-upload your site so that it becomes themed in this way by default. Why you’d want to do that I don’t know, but it is nevertheless an option if you’re trying to disguise a site as an Office document.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if someone, somewhere has used the workfriendly to display your site (the graphic above shows Yahoo seen through workfriendly eyes), then chances are you’re going to start seeing these errors in Google WMTs, which, as I said, is probably not a good thing.
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13 responses so far ↓
That errors in Google Webmaster tools happen in my website and I have been seriously down-ranking.
What can I do?
Pau Klein’s last blog post..Castillo de Játiva
It’s not necessarily connected to your down-ranking, that could be down to many other factors. You could contact the workfriendly people and ask them to remove all instances of your domain from their system and to block calls from their users to your site. That should get rid of the errors once Google respiders your site at the least, whether it will improve your rankings I don’t know.
db
As evidenced in the post below WorkFriendly.net is committing copyright infringement.
http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/blogsboro/workfriendlynet-another-copyright-infringer.html
Billy, they almost certainly are breaking copyright law (allegedly), but it’s not that they are a traditional scraper, your pages get spidered by their system when someone decides to hide your site behind their mask. I asked them to remove all references to my site and my GWMT 404s disappeared after a couple of days. However, someone else must have used the system again as they appeared once more at the end of last week.
db
David,
You’re right in that Work Friendly isn’t a scraper in the traditional sense but in some ways Work Friendly is worse as they are infringing on anyone and everyone’s text based content even if the site doesn’t have RSS.
And since I posted my rant I’m finding they’ve doubled the instances I find them in my logs. I’m working quietly behind the scenes to get them in deep water, send an e-mail and I’ll tell you how as I’m thinking the normal DMCA threats don’t work long term.
Don’t worry, the means I’m using is legal.
Anonymous // Jun 17, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Office2003Blue scraped pages can appear in Google searches.
Some of the links are to malware sites, but site testers such as the AVG8 toolbar test ONLY the
workfriendly dot net site.
McAfee Site Advisor’s automated site testing
also rates this one green.
They should rate it RED !!!
Office2003blue pages are a right royal pain in the ass. I’ve reported them on several occasions, blacklisted them, and yet I still see their damned 404 errors in my Google Webmaster Tools accounts. Maybe I should start a campaign to get them closed down…
It looks like the tireless campaigning of me and others against this scraper site has paid off. workfriendly.net is now just a parked domain with none of its previous functionality visible. Hah. Good riddance.
Hi David, Glad that the site is out but today I google my blog (karl novak blog) and google had indexing my blog like:
Microsoft Word
KARL NOVAK’S BLOG. PHOTOS AND IMAGES FROM AROUND THE WORLD, AIRPLANES, ANIMALS, FLOWERS AND EVERYTHING THAT WAS ON MY CAMERA EYE. …
http://www.workfriendly.net/browse/Office2003Blue/http/karlnovakphotos.blogspot.com// - 67k - Cached - Similar pages
How can I change this?
Thank you
Karl
Karl, what’s the google cache date for those pages and when did your site last get spidered? Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before they’re removed from the index, but you could send a spam alert and see if you can trigger Google to remove them manually now that WF is just a parked domain. Did you check your Google Webmaster Tools, no problems or messages there, I hope?
Thank you David, I’ll will report the spam, and no, no messages in google webmaster.
Thanks again
K
http://karlnovakphotos.blogspot.com/
Looks like Workfriendly has been shut down due to copyright issues but check out http://www.vanishd.com - similar type of service but allow for images and video.
Yes, we’re very glad workfriendly got smashed, what they were doing was a right royal pain in the ass. Anyway, I just had a quick look at Vanishd and recommend Sciencetext readers give it a try, it looks like a neat idea although I’m not entirely convinced of its value to anyone whose boss runs logging software.
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