Do content copycats (plagiarism) hurt original website rankings?
-
Hi all,
Found some websites stolen our content and using the same sentences in their website pages. Does this content hurt our website rankings? Their DA is low, still we are worried about the damage about this plagiarism.
Thanks
-
Google "recognises" the original source & will rank it higher, this has been the case for some time
-
You received a great reply from Alex.
We have lots of problems with content theft and go after much of it. Our response depends on WHO has grabbed the content and republished it. If our content is used on a dirtbag spammer site we go straight to the DMCA form that Alex linked to. Google responds to them, often the same day, and almost always within three or four days. They remove the infringing content from Google search. We have done this hundreds of times. (If you have many to file, you can use the back button of the DMCA form, edit what is different and send it in again).
If the content is on a large blogging site like WordPress or on a large forum, Google often tells us to go there and have the page taken down. These sites usually respond promptly.
Before you go cranking out DMCA at scale, if is a good idea to consult with a copyright attorney to learn about fair use or similar concepts in your country. There are many ways that someone can use your content without breaking copyright law. If you have someone taken down where fair use applies or where your claim to copyright can not be documented, they you could be on the receiving end of civil legal action.
Sometimes, more frequently than you think, we find our content on sites that should damn well know better than take our content. These have included law firms of all sizes, police departments, district attorneys, government regulatory agencies, government law enforcement, or simply the website of an honest and respectable company. In these cases we don't go to DMCA. These folks need education. So our attorney gets in touch with firm but friendly greetings. The culprit is often someone at their office who works on the website and took some shortcuts in content development. Also, their SEO or web developer grabbed our content, added it to the website and charged them for the content. These cases of content theft piss you off, but watching what happens can be entertaining.
ADDED: I forgot to address your main question. Can content theft and republication hurt your rankings? YES IT CAN. Some of the sites who steal content are powerful and can outrank you. In addition, you can lose long-tail traffic because your words on their page combine with other words on their page and outrank you in the long tail.
If a lot of websites steal the same piece of content, Google can have trouble deciding who owns it - even if you have a reasonably powerful site and the content has been on your website for a decade. Google says that they are "good" at identifying the owner, but I don't agree. We had important pieces of content descend into supplemental search results after a lot of other sites had stolen it. It only emerged after we spent a lot of energy on DMCAs and direct legal notices.
-
If your content is outranking the copied content, that's a fairly decent sign that Google assumes your content is the original and therefore you gain any benefits associated with that content.
Although Google is generally good at working out who the original content creator is and ranking that content higher, it's not always the case.
If you find that plagiarised content is ranking higher than your own (or you simply want to get the content removed from search), you can use the form here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice It looks like a fairly chunky serious form, but if you work your way through it, you'll be fine. They tend to take action within a week.
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 site not penalized
Was reviewing a site, www.adspecialtyproductscatalog.com, and noted that even though there are over 50,000 total issues found by automated crawls, including 3000 pages with duplicate titles and 6,000 with duplicate content this site still ranks high for primary keywords. The same essay's worth of content is pasted at the bottom of every single page. What gives, Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Is a recent hack or the disavow tool causing my alarming dropping in rankings!
My business site has been very successful organically for many years. Just recently we got hit with a spam hack and it was resolved within 3 days. However now my rankings are plummeting and I am so stressed out! So here is some timeline information any info would help: Sept. 4th hack first detected on Google Sept. 7th site completely clean, reconsideration accepted, spam content and links removed. Manual actions cleared. Rankings at this time have not been affected. Sept. 11th disavowed a few incoming links that were completely spam. (In hindsight I know this could have been the beginning of the end using this tool) Sept. 21st start to notice first significant drop in rankings and I went into GWT and downloaded latest 1000 links, I realized ALL of these were either hacked sites as well with spam content linking to our now delete spam content or inappropriate adult content. Sept. 22 Disavowed the 1000 domains (there are still probably 1000-2000 more) As of today rankings have SIGNIFICANTLY dropped, I have resubmitted sitemaps, image sitemaps, fetch and rendered as google. I'm stressing out incredibly and feel like I have made an error and that my site will never recover. I've worked using ALL white hat seo and the site used to rank very well top of page one for almost all my keywords. I feel lost and don't know what else I can do - and I know many say wait but it feels like forever. Is it possible that I didn't make a mistake using the disavow and that Google just took a while to penalize for the hack? Please any advice or experiences I would love to hear and appreciate so much anyone who takes the time to respond.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seounicorn0 -
Multiple E-commerce website
Following is a scenario where we plan to have a single database and different sites pulling product information from this. There will be a primary site with all the products listed and then there will be other category based website with the same products. All transactions will happen on respective website. The common factor will be products and its information. Our question is should we have different item numbers for the same product listed on two websites or they can be the same.?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | promodirect
e.g.
Website A: Product - Blue Shoes and item number '123'
Product page url will be: websitea.com/blueshoes-123.html Website B: Product - Blue Shoes and item number '123' or should the item# should be unique e.g. 'B123'
Product page url will be: websiteb.com/blueshoes-123.html
or
If item number is unique the product page url will be: websiteb.com/blueshoes-B123.html Please advise what is the best way forward.0 -
Something is strange, should be ranking fairly well - no visibility.
Hi Guys, This one is freakin' me out a little. We built my site and optimised it fairly well, especially on this page: http://snowdog.se/dogsledding/ where I am trying to rank for search term "dog sledding in lapland" now I receive a 95 rating for optimisation, I cant see anything wrong with it. We have a sitemap all seems well enough in the Google search console data but heck!!, we have submitted it to major engines but I have zero percent visibility. Can anyone see what's going on here? Free Sleddog Trip to the winner. Hahahaha. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. It must be something simple or weird! Kind Regards, Sno.....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sno3330 -
Got Google Manual penalty full Spam on my website
Here are Moz Metrics: http://prntscr.com/as3fp6 Site Url: www.financialprospect.com DA- 40 PA- 48 Spam Score - 0 RD- 68 Links No Loss in Backlink Profile I think my site is having much more spun content so can you suggest me the ways to re-index my site? How can i get my site back to google? Can you suggest any tool which give number of links already spun and then we may delete those posts. Looking for positive reply...!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | morisshibu1 -
Canonical tags being direct to "page=all" pages for an Ecommerce website
I find it alarming that my client has canonical tags pointing to "page=all" product gallery pages. Some of these product gallery pages have over 100 products and I think this could effect load time, especially for mobile. I would like to get some insight from the community on this, thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JMSCC0 -
Website not listing in google - screaming frog shows 500 error? What could the issue be?
Hey, http://www.interconnect.org.uk/ - the site seems to load fine, but for some reason the site is not getting indexed. I tried running the site on screaming frog, and it gives a 500 error code, which suggests it can't access the site? I'm guessing this is the same problem google is having, do you have any ideas as to why this may be and how I can rectify this? Thanks, Andrew
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Heehaw0 -
Should i buy this domain because it has a keyword that im trying to rank for?
Im trying to rank for a keyword and i saw that this domain is available the top listing under this search team is a domain authority 14 and according to seo site explorer has 1 page linking to it and its a no follow link. Would it make since to buy this domain optimize it and forward it back to my main site or is this bad to do.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gslc0