What reason would scrapers, and syndication sites outrank all of our content?
-
Typing in any of our titles for content, scrapers and content syndication sites all outrank us by quite a bit. What is the main reason for this usually? I started noticing this happening quite a bit this year, and think maybe it has to do with panda. Has anyone figured out the reasoning?
-
What is the main reason for this usually?
I don't think that there is really a main reason for this.... a couple things play in concert..
As with many sites that produce great content my bet is that... Lots of people have grabbed your stuff and are using it. They are using your titles and your brand and your words and your images to enrich a site that is monetized with ads or affiliate programs. Some of these people are really smart about optimization. Some of them have created sites that have become moderately powerful.
Perhaps this has not been theft. Perhaps you gave your content away and now you are paying the price for creating duplicate content that is being used against you by smart people.
And, google says that they are "good at recognizing relevant content to return to the searcher"... but they have not decided to put the resources into returning the original version - even after we tell them which version it is with rel=author as they requested. They have simply not decided to put the resources into this- even though I am sure that some of them would like it to work that way.
There you have it.
-
A few possibilities. We just went through this:
- If your site recently got hacked and delivered malware, Google may temporarily remove your site or push it down in the rankings. Assuming you fixed it, you should recover fairly soon.
- Do you rank #1 for your own brand name? If not, you may be under a Penguin or Panda penalty. Did you get a warning message from Google regarding unnatural links?
- Is the content on your site unique? (aside from the scrapers) If it's not, that can cause what you're seeing.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content on websites for multiple countries
I have a client who has a website for their U.S. based customers. They are currently adding a Canadian dealer and would like a second website with much of the same info as their current website, but with Canadian contact info etc. What is the best way to do this without creating duplicate content that will get us penalized? If we create a website at ABCcompany.com and ABCCompany.ca or something like that, will that get us around the duplicate content penalty?
Web Design | | InvoqMarketing0 -
Are URL suffixes ignored by Google? Or is this duplicate content?
Example URLs: www.example.com/great-article-on-dog-hygiene.html www.example.com/great-article-on-dog-hygiene.rt-article.html My IT dept. tells me the second instance of this article would be ignored by Google, but I've found a couple of instances in which Google did index the 'rt-article.html' version of the page. To be fair, I've only found a couple out of MANY. Is it an issue? Thanks, Trisha
Web Design | | lzhao0 -
For a real estate website, is a different mobile site warranted vs a responsive site?
I researched the major real estate websites: Zillow, Trulia, Remax, Keller Williams, Century 21, etc. They all have a separate mobile site and not a responsive one. The client wants it to be easy to search for properties from a smartphone. Is it possible to get a responsive version of a real estate website on a smartphone?
Web Design | | MassMedia0 -
Tips on website redesign on site with messy URLs?
So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing). Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency. Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot). Thanks!
Web Design | | seonubblet0 -
Website using javascript to serve up content - SEO Friendly?
I'm checking out a dentist website http://www.sagedentalnj.com/ I was referred by a friend so just taking a little peek at it. When you click on the menu items, the url at the top doesn't change. When you view source, the page titles are all the same. when I do site:http://www.sagedentalnj.com/ none of his pages are indexed by google. What can be done with his site so that google sees his pages? Maybe submit sitemap?
Web Design | | Czubmeister0 -
What is wrong with our site?
Hello Seomoz friends. I've about to pull all my hair out and need to turn somewhere. Our site, www.sightmax.com has been around since 2004. We used to be ranked at the top of page two on google under the keyword "live chat". We are no on page 4, heading to page 5. Can anyone take a look at the site and see if anything jumps out at you? The only way we have been able to get on the first page, is the pay for google adwords (which we've been doing every month for 7 years). Again, the site www.sightmax.com and the keyword is "live chat". Any help or feedback would be appreciated SO MUCH! Thanks! Eric
Web Design | | EricWeber0 -
Getting tons of duplicate content and title errors on my asp.net shopping cart, is there way to resolve this?
The problem I am having is that the web crawlers are seeing all my category pages as the same page thus creating duplicate content and duplicate title errors. At this time I have 270 of these critical errors to deal with. Here is an example: http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=1 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=2 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=3 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=4 All of these pages are see as the same exact page by the crawlers. Because these pages are generated by a SQL database I don't have a way I know of to fix it.
Web Design | | bsj20020 -
Why is site not being indexed by Google, and not showing on a crawl test??
On a site we developed of which .com is forwarded to .net domain, we quit getting crawled by google on about the 20th of Feb. Now when we try to run a crawl test on either url, we get There was an error fetching this page. Error description For some reason the page returned did not describe itself as an html page. It could be possible that the url is serving an image, rss feed, pdf, or xml file of some sort. The crawl tool does not currently report metrics on this type of data. Our other sites are fine and this was up to this date. We took out noodp, noydir today as the only thing we could think of. Site is on WP cms.
Web Design | | RobertFisher0