How to explain to a client that duplicate content is bad...
-
Afternoon!
An SEO client of ours has copied a load of landing/category page content from other sites. Lots of emails have been sent back and forth asking them to remove it, but they are adamant to keep it up there until we have time to amend it. We have explained to them:
- The Google penalty risks
- The copyright risks
- The short and long-term implications for their brand new business/website
- The money they are spending on our SEO package could be completely wasted if they're caught
I think the above is pretty black and white, but the director of this company will not budge. Does anyone have any different approaches? The director said he's happy for us to amend the content but, in the meantime, the plagiarised content will not be removed.
Cheers,
Lewis
-
The client will not remove the content until we have new content ready to go. He will not leave these pages blank, despite our advice that no content is much, much better than duplicated/plagiarised content.
We don't have the resource to write all this content within a short space of time, so we're going to have to run the risk of a penalty as the client is not budging on this.
-
Thanks!
-
You can use a service like CopyScape to crawl the web looking for your content.
Or, you can copy a unique sentence from your work, paste it into a google search box between "quotation marks" and that will reveal where that sentence has been duplicated.
-
EGOL- Is there a tool you use to find the stolen content?
-
I'd take the approach that you can do a BETTER job with the content,
If you decide to work for this person, then Joey's suggest here is the way to go. Duplicate content is not very competitive. You compete with the original source. If you have unique you get more traffic. If you have quality unique people will share it for you.
Also, if you have duplicated my content I will submit DMCA to Google, submit complaints to Adsense, submit DMCA to your host. I do these things as routine a couple times each week.
-
Is it black and white? It seems to me you are still looking at it as a gray area. He may be adamant, but how hard really is it to just write new content vs. "amending" it? I'd take the approach that you can do a BETTER job with the content, but he needs to dump the plagiarized content first. Nothing else you do will overcome the hit from that. If the content owners are emailing him, that means it's been out there more than long enough for Google to see it too. It's probably already too late.
Wasted money if their caught? It's wasted already. I'm totally with @EGOL on this - this guy sounds like a total wildcard and doesn't deserve any of our time.
-
I would personally approach this from a financial point of view, bring up both pages of content and show your customer the two side by side, then ask them "Why would a customer want to buy from you rather than the other store?" This approach has personally worked for me when all technical avenues have failed, as after all this is the same sort of lines that search engines live by showing the customer the most relevant page.
-
the director of this company will not budge.... the plagiarised content will not be removed.
He is a weasel. He steals content, knows it is wrong and is adamant about continuing to steal and benefit from his theft.
He will cheat you too if he gets the chance. If you amend this content then you have become a participant in his criminal acts.
If he gets caught he is going to blame everything on you.
Does anyone have any different approaches?
Stop working for this criminal. He is going to run up a big bill with you and then say that he does not know you, never did business with you, call you a liar.
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
-
Help With Duplicated Content
Hi Moz Community, I am having some issue's with duplicated content, i recently removed the .html from all of our links and moz has reported it as being duplicated. I have been reading up about Canonicalization and would to verify some details, when using the canonical tag would it be placed in the /mywebpage.html or /mywebpage file? I am having a hard time to sort this out so any help from you SEO experts would be great 🙂 I have also updated my htaccess file with the following Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | finelinewebsolutions0 -
Good idea to use hidden text for SEO purposes due to picky clients not allowing additional content?
I do SEO for eCommerce websites both in-house and for clients. A few of our clients want increased rankings but are not willing to allow us to make the changes internally to help make that happen. One of which is adding content to the webpages since 90% of them have very little to none. I have a couple clients that are extremely picky about what can be seen on their eCommerce website. They have the site setup the way they want it but it is not SEO friendly in the slightest. The pages (including homepage) have little to no content, and the only things they want changed are things visitors CANNOT see on the webpages (META, ALT Tags etc). The tactic i am wanting to use is often used by spammers but i have a legitimate reason to use this and wanted to know if this would be a good idea. They are wanting to target fairly competitive keywords but are unwilling to allow any on-page changes to add any information and keywords to help with rankings. I was thinking about adding text behind images or hide the text in whatever ways to prevent the end user from viewing it (except for the search engines). My idea was simply to add a paragraph or two of content for the search engines purely to help in ranking because they have a lot of pages that have zero content except for product image and title listings. Is this tactic recommended or does anyone have any other ideas for these type of situations. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
WordPress - duplicate content
I'm using WordPress for my website. However, whenever I use the post section for news, I get a report back from SEOmoz saying that there's duplicate content. What it does is it posts them in the Category and Archive section. Does anyone know if Google sees this as duplicate content and if so how to stop it? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | AAttias0 -
Duplicated Page Content
I have encountered this weird problem about duplicate page content. My site got 3 duplicate content similar on the link structure below. If I'm going to use rel canonical does it help to resolve the duplication problem? Thanks http://www.sample.com http://www.sample.com/ http://www.sample.com/index.php
On-Page Optimization | | mattvectorbpo0 -
Can duplicate content issues be solved with a noindex robot metatag?
Hi all I have a number of duplicate content issues arising from a recent crawl diagnostics report. Would using a robots meta tag (like below) on the pages I don't necessarily mind not being indexed be an effective way to solve the problem? Thanks for any / all replies
On-Page Optimization | | joeprice0 -
Does Google still see masked domains as duplicate content?
Older reads state the domain forwarding or masking will create duplicate content but Google has evolved quite a bit and I'm wondering if that is still the case? Not suggesting that a 301 is not the proper way to redirect something but my question is: Does Google still see masked domains as duplicate content? Is there any viable use for domain masking other than for affiliates?
On-Page Optimization | | TracyWeb0 -
Why does SEOmoz use /blog/content-title vs /category/content-title? Any difference?
Assume a brand new blog being designed and all other things equal. What are the pros & cons between using the url structure /blog/content-title vs. /category/content-title? Note:
On-Page Optimization | | JasonJackson
Both scenarios would be using categorical archiving.0 -
Duplicate Content Question
On the home page of my site I have a read more link that takes you to a different URL with basically the same content, just more of it. Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/ Read More Link on Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/deckmaintain.htm I think this may be affecting my seo. Any suggestions on what I should do about this? Should I add a canonical to the home page and/or on the other page? Both pages are indexed by google. Thanks for any help or tips.
On-Page Optimization | | opwdecks0