Steps you can take to ensure your content is indexed and registered to your site before a scraper gets to it?
-
Hi,
A clients site has significant amounts of original content that has blatantly been copied and pasted in various other competitor and article sites.
I'm working with the client to rejig lots of this content and to publish new content.
What steps would you recommend to undertake when the new, updated site is launched to ensure Google clearly attributes the content to the clients site first?
One thing I will be doing is submitting a new xml + html sitemap.
Thankyou
-
There are no "best practices" established for the tags' usage at this point. On the one hand, it could technically be used for every page, and on the other, should only be used when it's an article, blog post, or other individual person's writing.
-
Thanks Alan.
Guess there's no magic trick that will give you 100% attribution.
Regarding this tag, do you recommend I add this to EVERY page of the clients website including the homepage? So even the usual about us/contact etc pages?
Cheers
Hash
-
Google continually tries to find new ways to encourage solutions for helping them understand intent, relevance, ownership and authority. It's why Schema.org finally hit this year. None of their previous attempts have been good enough, and each has served a specific individual purpose.
So with Schema, the theory is there's a new, unified framework that can grow and evolve, without having to come up with individual solutions.
The "original source" concept was supposed to address the scraper issue, and there's been some value in that, though it's far from perfect. A good scraper script can find it, strip it out or replace the contents.
rel="author" is yet one more thing that can be used in the overall mix, though Schema.org takes authorship and publisher identity to a whole new, complex, and so far confused level :-).
Since Schema.org is most likely not going to be widely adopted til at least early next year, Google's encouraging use of the rel="author" tag as the primary method for assigning authorship at this point, and will continue to support it even as Schema rolls out.
So if you're looking at a best practices solution, yes, rel="author" is advisable. Until it's not.
-
Thanks Alan... I am surprised to learn about this "original source" information. There must not have been a lot of talk about it when it was released or I would have seen it.
Google recently started encouraging people to use the rel="author" attribute. I am going to use that on my site... now I am wondering if I should be using "original source" too.
Are you recommending rel="author"?
Also, reading that full post there is a section added at the end recommending rel="canonical"
-
Always have a sitemap.xml file with all the URLs you want indexed included in it. Right after publishing, submit the sitemap.xml file (or files if there are tens of thousands of pages) through Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. Include the Meta "original-source" tag in your page headers.
Include a Copyright line at the bottom of each page with the site or company name, and have that link to the home page.
This does not guarantee with 100% certainty that you'll get proper attribution, however these are the best steps you can take in that regard.
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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
Insane traffic loss and indexed pages after June Core Update, what can i do to bring it back?
Hello Everybody! After June Core Update was released, we saw an insane drop on traffic/revenue and indexed pages on GSC (Image attached below) The biggest problem here was: Our pages that were out of the index were shown as "Blocked by robots.txt", and when we run the "fetch as Google" tool, it says "Crawl Anomaly". Even though, our robots.txt it's completely clean (Without any disallow's or noindex rules), so I strongly believe that the reason that this pattern of error is showing, is because of the June Core Update. I've come up with some solutions, but none of them seems to work: 1- Add hreflang on the domain: We have other sites in other countries, and ours seems like it's the only one without this tag. The June update was primarily made to minimize two SERP results per domain (or more if google thinks it's relevant). Maybe other sites have "taken our spot" on the SERPS, our domain is considerably newer in comparison to the other countries. 2- Mannualy index all the important pages that were lost The idea was to renew the content on the page (title, meta description, paragraphs and so on) and use the manual GSC index tool. But none of that seems to work as well, all it says is "Crawl Anomaly". 3- Create a new domain If nothing works, this should. We would be looking for a new domain name and treat it as a whole new site. (But frankly, it should be some other way out, this is for an EXTREME case and if nobody could help us. ) I'm open for ideas, and as the days have gone by, our organic revenue and traffic doesn't seem like it's coming up again. I'm Desperate for a solution Any Ideas gCi46YE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muriloacct0 -
Duplicate Multi-site Content, Duplicate URLs
We have 2 ecommerce sites that are 95% identical. Both sites carry the same 2000 products, and for the most part, have the identical product descriptions. They both have a lot of branded search, and a considerable amount of domain authority. We are in the process of changing out product descriptions so that they are unique. Certain categories of products rank better on one site than another. When we've deployed unique product descriptions on both sites, we've been able to get some double listings on Page 1 of the SERPs. The categories on the sites have different names, and our URL structure is www.domain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name.cfm. So even though the product names are the same, the URLs are different including the category names. We are in the process of flattening our URL structures, eliminating the category and subcategory names from the product URLs: www.domain.com/product-name.cfm. The upshot is that the product URLs will be the same. Is that going to cause us any ranking issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Can I delay an AJAX call in order to hide specific on page content?
I am an SEO for a people search site. To avoid potential duplicate content issues for common people searches such as "John Smith" we are displaying the main "John Smith" result above the fold and add "other John Smith" search results inside an iframe. This way search engines don't see the same "other John Smith" search results on all other "John Smith" profile pages on our site and conclude that we have lots of duplicate content. We want to get away from using an iframe to solve potential duplicate content problem. Question: Can we display this duplicate "John Smith" content using a delayed AJAX call and robot.txt block the directory that contains the AJAX call?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAccount320 -
Can i get banned for my content?
Last night all our indexed pages are gone from google. Completely deindexed - banned. Links could not cause it, all of them are related, anchors diversified and spam is never used. Content is the same like our other website has, just some small changes. First stronger website is working as usual. So can it be that duplicate content caused a complete ban? (Website is 6 months old. Content has never been properly indexed, due to same reasons i think. Last week we made changes, ant it started to get indexed quite well until tonight..)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Can Dramatically Increasing Site Size Have Negative Effects?
I have a site with about 1000 pages. I'm planning to add about 30,000 pages to it. Can increasing the footprint by such an amount all of a sudden have any negative consequences for existing organic or hoped-for benefits from new pages? Would the site draw any increased scrutiny from Google for doing this? Any other considerations? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Is traffic and content really important for an e-commerce site???
Hi All, I'm maintaining an e-commerce website and I've encountered some related keywords that I know will not convert to sales but are related to the subject and might help becoming an "authority". I'll give an example... If a car dealership wrote an amazing article about cleaning a car.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Obviously it is related but the chances of someone looking to clean his car will go ahead and buy one now are quite low. Also, he will probably bounce out of this page after reading the piece. To conclude, Would such an article do GOOD (helping to become an authority and having more visitors) or BAD (low conversion rate and high bounce rate)? Thanks0 -
How can scraper sites be successful post Panda?
I read this article on SEJ: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/scrapers-and-the-panda-update/34192/ And, I'm a bit confused as to how a scraper site can be successful post Panda? Didn't panda specifically target sites that have duplicate content & shouldn't scraper sites actually be suffering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0