Remove Scraped Content?
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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?
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I explained the answer to this in the second part of my original post.
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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.
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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..."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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