Why do other sites rank higher for our blog content?

[FreedomKeepsMe]

Our site has always allowed other sites to RSS feed our content. Recently, we've noticed that searches for a title of our blog post will rank 2 sites that only publish said content, while our links are nowhere to be seen on the SERPs for Google.

Is there any way I can fix this or prod Google to adjust it for us?

Background: We were ranked highly in many long tail keywords, but lost many of them in June 2013. During this time going forward, we received no manual action.

[FreedomKeepsMe]

The scraper's canonical tag points to their own site. I just added canonical tags to our content. I hope we win out.

[EGOL]

When the same article appears on two websites and one of those has an rel=canonical pointing to the other website, then the site with the rel=canonical should not be indexed.

[FreedomKeepsMe]

So I looked into the articles on both sites.

1)The first offender uses  but links our original url using a <a href""=""> saying our page is the "source."</a>

<a href""="">2)The second offender just uses our titles and doesn't really have our content on their site, but links to the original page.

If  I "play around" with cross domain canonicals that will probably help in the future, but will Google de-rank the articles posted by the first offender?</a>

[EGOL]

You are getting a lot of diverse answers but Moosa has identified the key....

My advice would be to get quick links, whoever is syndicating your content ask them to link to the main source plus try playing around with cross domain canonicals and that might really help if the people who syndicate your content can add it on their website.

It does not matter who gets indexed first, adds new posts to sitemap, gets tweeted, gets fetched...  Google generally respects strength and generally obeys canonicals.

[Asjad]

Hey,

Depending upon authority, other pages are getting indexed earlier than yours. Best thing to avoid this thing

1. Submit Your Sitemap in Webmaster Tools to make your indexing fast
2. Whenever you add a blog post, make it indexed through this Google Tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url This works pretty quick.
3. Socialize your blog post immediately

I hope this will help the cause!

Regards

[Locutus]

I have found that a great way to take 'ownership' of your content is to immediately submit it to the Google index as soon as it goes live.

You can do this through Google Webmaster Tools.

Then, from the menu Crawl --> Fetch as Google.

Then, enter your URL, Fetch it, and Submit it to the index.

This should resolve your issue.

Note: Ensure that you get a confirmation message indicating that the page was submitted. Sometimes, it doesn't work on the first try.

[MoosaHemani]

I guess there are two parts in the question so let me go one by one!

Why other websites are ranking above mine? Exactly, when they use your RSS feed, they probably might get crawled quicker than the original content and that is why the problem starts!

My advice would be to get quick links, whoever is syndicating your content ask them to link to the main source plus try playing around with cross domain canonicals and that might really help if the people who syndicate your content can add it on their website.

You lost good amount of ranking positions in June 2013, I checked Moz Google Penalty calendar and finds out that there are 3 Google updates in June 2013 that are:

-          Payday Loan on 11^th June

-          Panda dance on the same day

-          Multi Week update on June 27, 2013

See if the traffic drop is around these days and in case of yes you know what the problem on your website is, consider fixing it!

Hope this helps!

[GlobeRunner]

Google uses a lot of different factors to determine why one site ranks above another site. However, when it comes to duplicate content (other sites using your site's RSS feed to generate content on their site), Google determines who posted the content first--and then the others are considered to be duplicates.

In your case, most likely the other sites are getting crawled quicker--therefore you are not the one who is originating the content, according to Google. You need Google to crawl your site quicker, and that typically is determined by how often you post content and the links to your content. Get more quality links to your site, and make sure you post on your social profiles (twitter, google plus, facebook, linkedin) whenever you post on your site.