Concerns of Duplicative Content on Purchased Site
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Recently I purchased a site of 50+ DA (oldsite.com) that had been offline/404 for 9-12 months from the previous owner. The purchase included the domain and the content previously hosted on the domain. The backlink profile is 100% contextual and pristine.
Upon purchasing the domain, I did the following:
- Rehosted the old site and content that had been down for 9-12 months on oldsite.com
- Allowed a week or two for indexation on oldsite.com
- Hosted the old content on my newsite.com and then performed 100+ contextual 301 redirects from the oldsite.com to newsite.com using direct and wild card htaccess rules
- Issued a Press Release declaring the acquisition of oldsite.com for newsite.com
- Performed a site "Change of Name" in Google from oldsite.com to newsite.com
- Performed a site "Site Move" in Bing/Yahoo from oldsite.com to newsite.com
It's been close to a month and while organic traffic is growing gradually, it's not what I would expect from a domain with 700+ referring contextual domains. My current concern is around original attribution of content on oldsite.com shifting to scraper sites during the year or so that it was offline.
For Example:
- Oldsite.com has full attribution prior to going offline
- Scraper sites scan site and repost content elsewhere (effort unsuccessful at time because google know original attribution)
- Oldsite.com goes offline
- Scraper sites continue hosting content
- Google loses consumer facing cache from oldsite.com (and potentially loses original attribution of content)
- Google reassigns original attribution to a scraper site
- Oldsite.com is hosted again and Google no longer remembers it's original attribution and thinks content is stolen
- Google then silently punished Oldsite.com and Newsite.com (which it is redirected to)
QUESTIONS
- Does this sequence have any merit? Does Google keep track of original attribution after the content ceases to exist in Google's search cache?
- Are there any tools or ways to tell if you're being punished for content being posted else on the web even if you originally had attribution?
- Unrelated: Are there any other steps that are recommend for a Change of site as described above.
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Hi, John.
Ok, there is a q/a video of matt cutts answering the question about "originality" of content in terms of if bigger website copies content from smaller author-website. (Can't find the link to it, may be other MOZers will help out here). Matt said that yes, it's possible. So, as far as I understand, Google can reassign original attribution. Especially, if your website was offline for long time.
At the same time, here is a Matt Cutts' video about duplicate content as a penalizing factor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA
According to that video, unless you're very spammy scraper, you are going to be fine in terms of duplicate.
About slow gain of rankings - having lots of referring domains is not the guarantee of fast or good rankings. It surely helps a lot, but it's not the only thing. Have you optimized content, technical SEO etc? As of tools for penalties - use Google Webmaster tools - manual action section. If there is nothing there, you haven't been penalized by google
About any recommendations - well, as I said, update/optimize content if needed, get your technical SEO in order. Since you said the rankings are growing and it has been a month since you've launched website - you're doing pretty good. It always requires time, my friend.
Hope this helps.
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