Sites Copying my Content Ranking Higher
-
A number of sites are copying - either 100% word for word, paragraphs, or sentences of my content and are ranking higher.
Some sites are doing this with permission/properly and are linking back to my article Others are not linking back or giving credit.
Some of these sites, in some cases are ranking higher than me in Google results.
What can I do?
-
It will make an impact. I have had authorship set up for months now and it has made a difference to click-throughs. Basically I have more traffic now than before. And I believe this is partly due to the photo in the SERPs.
We put an authorship plugin together for WordPress as we needed to implement authorship on our own sites and client sites. It's free - you can try it if you feel you can't or don't want to do it manually. http://www.authorsure.com.
-
Ben, you can read this thread.
-
Thanks. Is that an automatic thing if I meet the guidelines? Cant see how to sign up for it..
-
Take a look at First Click Free from google.
-
Thanks.
I'm going to try to set up the author profiles and see what happens with that. I gain something from most of the people sharing my content (not as much as I lose from them ranking above me) so I'd rather just find a way to get myself above them 9 times out of 10 and that seems like a great option. Hopefully that will reduce any impact of Panda changes?
-
Hi EGOL,
I am having the same issue also, these websites are not out ranking me for a particular keyword, however if I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text into Google on one of my product pages lots of other websites are above my listing that has copied my content, even though my page has higher authority and PR.
Should I be worrying about this?
Kind Regards
-
do a search for "wp content protect", you'll have to be cautios because those plugins can harm your seo strategy.
-
Agreed, he needs to evolve a strategy that is based on 2 things:
a) Claiming authorship of his original content
b) Devising ways to prevent content theft
At the same time, if his site was inflicted with a Panda-penalty, he will make a lot of gains using authorship.
-
One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content.
I believe that this is a very good idea. However, I am confident that it will not solve the problem. Google is not giving strong weight to claimed authorship at this time.
Your strongest weapon is DMCA actions and to stop giving others permission to use your content.
Your site could be suffering from Panda ranking reductions as a result of your own content being wild on the web.
-
Ok. Thanks... you think this would make a big impact in general with search engine results?
-
That is correct.
-
Headshot and real persons name?
Thx
-
It wont work without a proper headshot.
-
But is there a way to set it so that it wont show my name/picture?
Thanks
-
The author profile is just a way to authenticate yourself to Google. If you have the ability to set profiles for other people of your company, you should be fine.
-
Can I do author profile without using my name? I have stuff written by other people/don't include my name on the site.
-
It must look different where you are. I get the exact match domain, haaretz.com, then a couple of copies of mine, and then mine.
I'll look at the author profile.
-
There is not a simple solution for your particular case. Your site ranks below an exact match domain and another site that is haaretz.com. It would be very difficult to rank above chriscornell.com as it is an exact match domain.
Haaretz.com has a domain authority of 91, while your site's domain authority is 40. Until you tell the search engines that the content posted on haaretz.com is originally yours, it would seem difficult for your site to outrank haaretz.com
As a first step, I will setup an author profile using g+. That should give you more visits since your author profile information should include headshot as well.
Besides this, I don't thin there are many options that are available off the table. You will need to work on improving your site's overall authority.
-
Thanks. I'm using Wordpress, what would you suggest?
-
Thanks for the reply. The site url is www.touristisrael.com and an example is if you Google:
"Chris Cornell in Israel" or
"Chris Cornell in Tel Aviv"
Do you mean author profiles on Google +?
-
Do you mind sharing your site's URL? One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content. It would be a way to tell Google that it's your content.
It may take a few weeks time for things to settle down.
-
Try using some plugins to protect your content if you're using any cms, it's not enough but it's a start...
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
-
Effects of forwarding content to another site?
Our e-commerce store is moving away from a set of products. Instead of just redirecting these to an another section of our site, we were considering redirecting them to another site that sells the product. I don't mind losing that traffic, but I don't want it to inadvertently hurt our other product lines. Any thoughts on the impact of 301 redirecting a certain section of traffic to another domain? Anything I should we on the lookout for or consider?
Technical SEO | | CPollock0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
All other things equal, do server rendered websites rank higher than JavaScript web apps that follow the AJAX Crawling Spec?
I instinctively feel like server rendered websites should rank higher since Google doesn't truly know that the content its getting from an AJAX site is what the user is seeing and Google isn't exactly sure of the page load time (and thus user experience). I can't find any evidence that would prove this, however. A website like Monocle.io uses pushstate, loads fast, has good page titles, etc., but it is a JavaScript single page application. Does it make any difference?
Technical SEO | | jeffwhelpley0 -
Ranking overseas
I have a well established website that I market as the busness being based in London, how hard would it be for me to start ranking for phrases in America? (An increasing amount of our work is being carried out in America.) What exactly would it entail? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Will syndicated content hurt a website's ranking potential?
I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider. The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc. My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time? Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | copyjack0 -
Duplicat content affecting SEO Rankings
We have one main site called buypropertyanywhere, it is a database it holds all the data for all our property websites. One of our most popular sites is housesalesbulgaria, which takes the data from buypropertyanywhere in regards to bulgarian property and display it. The same with housesalesturkey it takes the data in regards to turkish property and display it. We think because buypropertyanywhere and housesalesbulgaria has the same data it has high duplicate content . We think this is affecting the SEO rankings for housesalesbulgaria. Google is looking at housesalesbulgaria as if a copy of buypropertyanywhere. So therefore should we SEO buypropertyanywhere soley and link it to housesalesbulgaria through the articles and content we put on the site. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Feily0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0