Remove Scraped Content?
-
There is a site I work for that has content that, when you search in Google a snippet of text from, they are not the top result for. I believe what has happened is that they had written blogs and articles and added them to their site and article directories at the same time and the article directories got cached first.
If we're not coming up first for our article, that means we are not believed to be the original author, correct?
Should I remove all content from our site where this is happening, even though we actually did create these articles?
-
I explained the answer to this in the second part of my original post.
-
I would hope you had a link, when possible, back to your site. If not, then the page should be dated by creation and last update which Google can see. Although I would not leave anything up to guess work, but make sure you have links, and I would even put the date it was posted onto the post on your site like news article are. Just another indicator.
I would not remove the content if in fact, it did originate from you.
-
Yes, it was intentionally distributed. I would like to know whether the duplicate content on our site is being seen (by Google) as copied, not original, scraped, pulled from another source because we're so lazy we can't come up with any material of our own??
If this is the case, I will be removing the content, as the quality of the content sucks and there is quite a bit of it. Please, do not respond "if the content sucks, then why have it on your site..."
-
The term "scraped content" is most often used for content that has been grabbed from your website by a visiting robot.
Based upon your posting, the duplicate content that you are talking about was intentionally distributed.
-
Then how do you determine if Google is seeing content as scraped? As you know, Google has made it very clear recently how they feel about scraped content.
-
If we're not coming up first for our article, that means we are not believed to be the original author, correct?
Search engines can not identify original authors. (unless you use the rel="author" attribute and then they are merely taking your word for it) They only know which page with the content was discovered first. The content could have been on other pages first or the content could have been published first offline. Search engines don't have divine powers
The page that ranks first in the SERPs is the one that has the best combination of relevance, domain authority and other ranking factors. Has nothing to do with authorship.
Should I remove all content from our site where this is happening, even though we actually did create these articles?
I would not do that if the content is valuable for your visitors, has acquired links from other sites or if the content is pulling traffic from search.
The take-away from this is not to give your content away if you want to rank for it in search. Giving it away can create strong competitors and feed existing competitors.
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
-
Clarification on duplicate content
Hi, if I have a page that unintentionally ranks for a term that I want to create a page for - say "atlanta apartments" - should I still create a page specifically intended to rank for "atlanta apartments"? Will canonical tags be crucial in this case? Hoping to avoid creating duplicate content and instead create the correct content for a specific term.
Content Development | | smiller760 -
Where to order content?
I have a number of clients struggling with publishing frequent blog content. Can anyone recommend any content ordering services? - I've seen Constant Content and a couple of others. I'm just wondering if these are effective?, SEO-friendly? (completely safe from duplication, etc.)? - and if anyone can recommend the best choices based on experience. In the past clients I've been fortunate in working with clients who are writing themselves, or connecting with a copywriter and going through the process of creating content. However I'm looking for an alternative solution to solve content drought with some clients which simply don't have the time to go through that process and need to see results.
Content Development | | GregDixson0 -
Loads of Blog Search Results showing up in SERPs - What's the best way to remove?
Our client has a good number of results showing up in SERPs that are search results pages produced by Blog posts. Unfortunately all these results have exactly the same Title tag and it has nothing to do with the blog content which means they are unlikely to help us much. We can’t create a 301 redirect because there is no page to redirect. There is no blog page we can re=canonical to either. The content on these pages is a short list of blog posts by each author. They are not true “Author” pages that would have a URL structure like this: your company.com/author/joeblow Our plan is to use GWMT's URL removal tool to request remove of these pages. (and then try to stop new results from being created) We are doing this to get low-value content out of the SERP. Is there a better way to remove these search results? Any drawback in removing them in GWMTs? Thanks.
Content Development | | RosemaryB1 -
Great content/news articles - but struggling to drive traffic from them
We publish 2-3 great quality news stories/posts on our sites weekly, but are struggling to gain traffic from external sources for them, other than our own blog and socials. We have followings for each of our sites, but want to expand and get our posts found in other relevant blogs, features, releases etc. The posts are 'Top 10 Tips...', 'How To... in 6 Easy Steps', 'What Makes a Great...' etc. All great things that people want to read about and share. All this of course helps towards the SEO of the sites, but the posts aren't written for that, they are written to guide and inform. My question is, how are other people getting their great content found online, talked about and shared? I personally think that our posts are awesome; containing useful information that will help people. Isn't that what it's all about?
Content Development | | bricktech0 -
Modifying Content to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues
We are planning to leverage specific posts from a US-based blog for our own Canadian blog (with permission, of course) but are aware that this can cause duplicate content issues. We're willing to re-write as much or as little as we must from the initial blog posts to avoid duplicate content issues but I have no idea just how much we will need to re-write. Is there some guideline for this (e.g., 25% of content must be re-written)? I've been unable to find anything. Thank you in advance!
Content Development | | QueenSt0 -
How often should content be updated
With all of Google's recent algo updates (or ranking updates, whatever they're calling it now), we've obviously been looking into changing our content strategy and shifting it from quantity to quality. How often would you say is ideal for website content updates? i.e. should we be updating once a month? Once every couple of months? This isn't a blog - just a regular services-oriented site. My take on it is that it should be as often as organically possible - and that means something different for everyone. At the same time, we want Google coming back frequently to crawl the site. Thanks!
Content Development | | eyecarepro0 -
Quality content distribution service?
I want to distribute my articles without having to go multiple sites to get the job done. What is the best quality and most reputable company to help me distribute my content?
Content Development | | photoseo10 -
Duplicate content and Facebook
If i have content on my site and the same content duplicated on my facebook pages, will google treat this as duplicate content? At the moment when i copy and paste a line of text from the content on my site Facebook is returned first.
Content Development | | Turkey0