Workfriendly Goes Offline
By Jonathan Bailey • Jul 10th, 2008 • Category: Articles, News
Workfriendly, a site previously reported on Plagiarism Today back in November 2007 and again in April of this year, stopped functioning sometime within the past few days, bringing an end to the problems it created for many Webmasters.
The site currently is just a “parked” domain page running ads for the domain’s registrar, GoDaddy. According to the whois information for the site, the domain was “updated” on the eighth, indicating that it possibly expired and was transferred to another owner.
Workfriendly attempted to disguise Web surfing as a Microsoft Word document by formatting Web pages to appear as text in a Word file while bordering the site content with a fake border designed to look like the application. This was supposed to make it “safer” to surf at work as it would raise less suspicion should anyone see your monitor.
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. It also created headaches by not obeying certain meta tags, causing links to break on some sites and for Google to report those errors as broken links on the original domain.
It is unclear at this time if the outage is temporary or permanent, however, the site has been down for at least two days, making a temporary outage increasingly unlikely.
Hat tip: Special thanks to David Bradley of Sciencebase (stupid typos, thanks for the catch!) for letting me know that Workfriendly is not working
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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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
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!
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
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…
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
“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.
I really loved that site
I really loved that site
I really loved that site