Duplicate content
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Hi mozzers,
I've been doing some broken link building and it's been going quite well. I've made a high value page and asked webmasters to link to it to replace the 404s. My page was ranking on google, not well, you had to copy/paste a portion of the page for it showup. Sadly another webmaster has posted my exact post on their blog and now when you search for a portion of text, the copied page shows up on google instead of mine. He has give me the credit for it and linked to my page. Am I at risk of losing credit for my work and links as the copied page is ranking? Or will google figure it out as my page will have more links and the copied page links to me.
Thanks
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It's definitely worth asking about that canonical link. If they are nice, they'll add it - and I've personally been lucky with that before. If they were "nice" enough to credit you for the blog post and link to the original source, then they should be fine with adding it.
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To quote Google: "Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."
Having a backlink from the copied page to your site can help Google to determine that your page is the original source - however it's no guarantee (if his site has a better link profile it could well be that Google prefers the copied site). It would be better if the copy site would put a canonical url pointing to your page.
Dirk
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