[arn]

I'm not saying he doesn't have a problem, but his site does appear above the others in search results for that quotation. "The consensus view among scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis"

It's such a specific quotation that there aren't that many sites that have that text, so the spam sites are gonna appear.

Now if those sites outrank his site for regular search terms "what is a polygraph" ... then that's a problem. But he didn't seem to indicate that's the case.

[giles_corey]

The spam sites that replicate the original page's content make the original page look like low value content, too.

[tedivm]

He does indicate it-

> With the text of my homepage replicated across hundreds of such modified pages, it has essentially disappeared from Google for key search terms for the site, such as "polygraph."

[arn]

ok. then right, it's the vaguer question of whether his site deserves to rank higher than it does for a particular term.

on brief glance, it doesn't look like he optimizes for "polygraph". He does rank #1 for antipolygraph.

[CodeWriter23]

I do not consider the question of whether actual authoritative content should outrank hacked pages with duplicate content to be ”vague”.

[arn]

but that's not the issue here. There is no example where duplicate content is outranking his. In the quoted query, he ranks higher. Beyond that he says he doesn't rank well for "polygraph", but not that it's outranked by the spammy content.

[tedivm]

The timing is also interesting, as Google has recently updated their search engine results to be more "context aware", which may result in sites like that dropping in the rankings since their subject matter is actually a bit different than what people searching for "polygraph" might expect.

[Thorrez]

The attacker's goal isn't to have the spam sites outrank his. The goal is to have his lower ranked, I assume so that when people search about polygraphs, they see top-ranked sites that are pro-polygraph instead of anti-polygraph.

The attackers seem to have achieved that goal.