An Unfair Content related penalty :(
-
Hi Guys,
Google.com.au
website: http://partysuppliesnow.com.au/We had a massive drop in search queries in WMT around the 11th of september this year, I investigated and it seemed as though there were no updates around this time.
Our site is only receiving branded search now - and after investigating i am led to believe that Google has mistakingly affected our website in the panda algorithm. There are no manual penalties applies on this site as confirmed by WMT.
Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results. This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.
Typing a products full name into Google (tried a handful) our site is not in the top 100 or 200 at times, i think this further clarifies that we are penalised.
We would really appreciate some opinions on this. Any course of actions would be great. We don't particularly want to invest in writing content again.
From our point of view it looks like Google is stopping our site from ranking because it's getting mixed up with who the originator for our content is.
Thanks and really appreciate it.
-
Hey Jarrod,
I'm afraid there isn't anything you can actually do to tell Google you are the original author of your content, other than the tips Remus mentioned.
However, there is a service that you can use to help you identify sites that are duplicating your content. It's called Copysentry and it automatically scans the web to check for content duplication. You could use this, in conjunction with DMCA take down requests (as mentioned in Remus's post) to help to defend against this in future.
-
Hi guys,
Thank you all, for your kind advices. We have planned to re-write our content (product descriptions). Now, we will write 2 types of descriptions. 1 for our site and 1 for our affiliates (who promote our products). We hope Google won't confuse it this time.
As we are going to write the content again. I am still afraid, it could be stolen again. So, is there a way that we could tell Google that we are the originator of this new content???
If there isn't any solution, I think, we would lose our ranking again. Right??? I don't wanna lose our efforts again. So, can you suggest any concrete solution???
thanks again guys
Jarrod -
Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results.
I saw the same thing. There is your problem.
This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.
Although google says that they are "pretty good" at attributing content to the creator the truth is that the suck at it.
Lots of people have this problem. Guard your content so it doesn't get out to affiliates and shopping engines. This means strongly enforced rules for your affiliates and blocking crawlers from your site - but allowing google in.
-
In addition going forward you should always ensure you have two types of content. A set of content you use on your site, and another set of content that you supply to affiliate sites and any other sites you supply products too.
I know this isn't much help now, but its something you should do in future to prevent such issues.
-
Hi Jarrod,
You are in a very complicated situation. I hope you can find a solution.
This video posted by Matt Cutts a wile ago might help you with a few additional tips:
How can I make sure that Google knows my content is original?
- DMCA request: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
- Google News source attribution metatags: link here
- Or even spam report like Matt Cutts suggests.
-
Hi Jarrod,
The first thing I noticed, a lot of pages in your site don't contain a rel=canonical tag. For example, this one: http://www.partysuppliesnow.com.au/view-products/96/LED-Furniture
We know that Google is not particularly good at identifying the original source of a content. So, you can report the sites that scraped your content to Google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en). That'll let Google know about the issue and hopefully lift the penalty off your site and penalize the other site.
Another issue could be the Authorship setup on product pages. It's considered as Authorship abuse. Generally, you don't want to link a Google+ profile with a site's homepage and other generic pages.
I've had some experience with Panda. I can say no-indexing is very effective in fighting Panda. If you know about a significant number of low-quality pages in your site, that you wouldn't prefer to open as a searcher, you should add a meta no-index tag in the section of those pages. It takes some time to get out of the Panda box.
Regards,
Rohit
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 Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
Content position and topic modelling
Hi, Two questions here, First: Does the position of content have any impact on performance? For example say a page displays a league table (20 rows) so eats up most of the above-fold space. Would that table being top followed by content have a negative impact? Would creating 'some' content before a table help? Second: Does topic modelling actually help relevance signals? So say I sold guitars and the page had the word 'guitar' throughout the content, would including electric, acoustic, strings, amps etc also in the content help the page become more relevant for the term 'guitar'? Or would it just expand the terms the page would be eligible to show for? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk1 -
Algorithm Penalty?
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. The URL in question is: http://goo.gl/9lGqxDSince this website was relaunched around the same time as the Panda algorithm update, it's dropped from the 1st page of results down to page 6 or lower. Essentially, this website no longer ranks well in the Google UK for relevant keywords to the business when combined with the place names in it's geographical operation areas.It's worth noting that the website ranks very well in other search search engines such as Bing! The website had a lot of spammy links which we've requested to be removed from the respective site owners. Most of which are either non-responsive or want extortionate amounts of money to remove the links so we have used Google disavow links tool. We suspect the site is being penalised as a result of the spammy inbound links something which is supported by the fact that only the new pages or pages with fresh content are ranking (http://goo.gl/D1NpxH). However, Google Webmaster tools reports no messages or critical issues.On the whole the website is updated occasionally. The writing is very easy to understand, it's quick to load, URLs are clear and the titles and descriptions are partly optimised.We're believe that our only option is to abandon the current domain and completely rewrite the content for a new domain. Does anyone else have any ideas how we can fix this before we go ahead?Many thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chichesterdesign0 -
2 URLS pointing to the same content
Hi, We currently have 2 URL's pointing to the same website (long story why we have it) - A & B. A is our main website but we set up B as a rewrite URL to use for our Pay Per Click campaign. Now because its the same site, but B is just a URL rewrite, Google Webmaster Tools is seeing that we have thousands of links coming in from site B to site A. I want to tell Google to ignore site B url but worried it might affect site A. I can't add a no follow link on site B as its the same content so will also be applicable on Site A. I'm also worried about using Google Disavow as it might impact on site A! Can anyone make any suggestions on what to do, as I would like to hear from anyone with experience with this or can recommend a safe option. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Party_Experts0 -
News section of the website (Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozers One of our client wanted to add a NEWS section in to their website. Where they want to share the latest industry news from other news websites. I tried my maximum to understand them about the duplicate content issues. But they want it badly What I am planning is to add rel=canonical from each single news post to the main source websites ie, What you guys think? Does that affect us in any ways?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyas_heych0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Why do URL with .html or index.php at the end are annoying to the search engine? I heard it can create some duplicate content but I have no idea why? Could someone explain me why is that so? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1