Competitor scraped ecommerce product overview

[pugh]

I noticed by chance that the competitor of an ecommerce client has completely copied one of their product overviews, which is around 500 words in total.

The site does not outrank my client, but could the scraped content be harmful in any other way?

There are no links included within the text so there's no advantage in that sense.

Is Google's algorithm intuitive enough to figure out where the original content came from and attribute it to my client, or is there still the possibility that it could have a negative affect as duplicate content?

Any insights and suggestions much appreciated.

[Everett]

Paddy,

Thanks for clarifying. My mum is indeed very nice.

If we replace "my mom's blog" with "a slightly less trusted site, but still very similar in scale, topic, age, etc..." then you can see where it gets more difficult to base the decision on which has been crawled first.

But yes, I agree that being the first page crawled and indexed with that content must be a huge (though I think trust-based metrics would be more important) factor in the decision by Google's ranking algorithms.

[PaddyDisplays]

But you mom's blog will get crawled far less frequently than page A as it has less authority, so the chances the your mum read copied and then posted on her blog before the main site was crawled and in time for her site to get crawled would be very unlikely.  Other wise it would be very unfair that "bigger sites" get credit simply just by being bigger.  But I get your point that being found first is the only factor, but I would think it would be a big factor if not the biggest (back links to the original article would be one I would think)

Btw i'm sure you Mom is a very nice person and would never steal a story of another site for her own blog

Note: I have come to this conclusion based on observation and logic (and others posting similar theories), but I don't have any conclusive proof, I wonder if anyone has do any research into it...

[Everett]

I have to disagree that the credit goes to whichever version was found "first". I think attribution of authoritativeness and/or origination is a bit more complicated than that. For example, if page A and B both have the same content and page A is found first, but page B has 20 high-quality external links on a domain with a lot of authority and page A only has 1 link and is on my mom's blog... I doubt Google is going to think my mom is the original just because her site was crawled first.

Yes it can be a problem and yes you should do something about it if you can prove that your client wrote the content and that it isn't just the same manufacturer supplied product description that everyone gets.

First ask the offending site to remove their copied content. If that doesn't work you can file a DMCA complaint here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&&rd=1

[PaddyDisplays]

If google crawled and picked up the text on your site before your competitor  then you get the "credit" for it,  which logicly they should have since you had the text first, only problem if your competitor is a bigger site DA wise and they are crawled more often.

But e-commerce site copying text from other site has been happening for a long time, they are just not doing themselves any favours

edit: missed eyepaq post, but yeah, what he said

[eyepaq]

Hi,

A lot of higher authority sites (I am not talking about ny times but just, in a particular space, sites that have a higher authority then others) are copying lower authority sites and get credit for it from Google.

In your case -dose your competitor has more visibility and authority in general ? Was the copy session soon after your client released that particular page ? If both answers are yes, then there is a danger there. If not - there is nothing to be concerned of.

Most of the time, like you said, google's algorithm is intuitive enough to figure out where the original content came from but it's not perfect.