Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
-
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more.
Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us.
I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape.
What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
-
To extend EGOL's excellent advice... these guys are using totally automated methods to scrape and post your content. So to fight back, you're also going to need to effectively automate as much of your discovery and takedown process as possible. You'll never beat enough of their automated volume processes with your own resource-intensive (i.e. fully manual) responses.
Good luck - I hate these assclowns with a fiery passion too. (Former pro photographer here.)
Paul
-
Glad to help. It makes me really mad when people steal content.
I forgot to add that your competitors might become your ally in this type of fight. I have an Indian competitor, a really smart and hard-to-beat company for the past decade, who joined me in fighting these infringers. If you can get another company in your niche to complain about the same websites, I think that will have a good impact. Never hurts to have friends in India.
-
Extremely thorough and insightful response. I hadn't thought of some of these other avenues. If nothing else, this gives us new things to try, and new reason to be hopeful.
THANK YOU!
-
I know how frustrating it can be when your work is grabbed by spammers.
We have work that has been wildly grabbed and republished by spammers in a competitive industry. Our approach was to get educated about copyright and fair use, get an attorney ready to help, if needed, and then attack the spammers with DMCA, complaints to Adsense and complaints to hosts. At first it seemed hopeless, but after nearly 200 DMCA's to Google and a lot of complaints to Adsense and hosting companies we are now seeing rewarding results.
If you are fighting this it is important to identify the spammers and then see if any high quality sites are linking to them, and then go after those links by letting the linking webmasters know that you are the real source of the information. Before you do that be sure that your online information is totally better than what the spammers have put up. If the spammers have up your whole collection and you only have half of it up then you are not as attractive of a link target.
Attacking with DMCA is the minimum. Send them to Google search while logged into your Google account and use the Copyright Removal Dashboard. That makes it easy for Google to see the mass of complaints that you are throwing at them. It also makes it fast and easy to file several complaints every morning.
If those sites are running Adsense, attack their income stream. Visit their site while logged into your adsense account. Then click on the "ad choices" button in the upper right corner of an Adsense ad on their page. That will take you to an Adsense Help page titled, "about google ads". Scroll down to the bottom of that page and you will see "Leave feedback on the website or ad you just saw". Click "the ads". Then click "Adwords ad feedback form". Then click on "An ad violates other AdWords policies". Use that form to complain that they are publishing your copyrighted content. I have found that the Adsense team often turns off the ads on those pages promptly and sometimes turns the ads off across the entire website.
Look at the Adsense codes on the websites to see if the same publisher code is used on lots of these sites. If you find this then hammer those sites with complaints. Be sure you let them know that these sites have MANY pages that contain stolen content to which you own copyright. Complain that the same publisher has lots of websites, each with lots of your content. Complain with enthusiasm.
Hosting companies will often respond by deleting images, pages or text that are your copyrighted content. They might also delete entire sites.
Keep in mind that submitting DMCA, attacking their Adsense or getting them kicked off of their hosting can make people really mad. So, be sure that you are within your right and they are not making fair use of your content. Google or adsense or hosts will give the infringer your name when they notify them that a complaint was filed and they removed them from search, killed their adsense income or booted them off of the server.
Good luck.
(The above contains information about legal matters and I am not an attorney. I warned you that you need advice from an attorney so that you know if these people are really infringing or if they are using your content under fair use. If you do any of the things listed above they could get an attorney who will try to sue your pants off. If you file DMCAs that are unmerited Google might provide free legal assistance or friends of the court support to the target of your DMCAs. You are dead meat of that happens.)
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
-
Google Update
My rank has dropped quite a lot this past week and I can see from the Moz tools that there is an unconfirmed Google update responsible. Is there any information from Moz on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Prioritise a page in Google/why is a well-optimised page not ranking
Hello I'm new to Moz Forums and was wondering if anyone out there could help with a query. My client has an ecommerce site selling a range of pet products, most of which have multiple items in the range for difference size animals i.e. [Product name] for small dog
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LauraSorrelle
[Product name] for medium dog
[Product name] for large dog
[Product name] for extra large dog I've got some really great rankings (top 3) for many keyword searches such as
'[product name] for dogs'
'[product name]' But these rankings are for individual product pages, meaning the user is taken to a small dog product page when they might have a large dog or visa versa. I felt it would be better for the users (and for conversions and bounce rates), if there was a group page which showed all products in the range which I could target keywords '[product name]', '[product name] for dogs'. The page would link through the the individual product pages. I created some group pages in autumn last year to trial this and, although they are well-optimised (score of 98 on Moz's optimisation tool), they are not ranking well. They are indexed, but way down the SERPs. The same group page format has been used for the PPC campaign and the difference to the retention/conversion of visitors is significant. Why are my group pages not ranking? Is it because my client's site already has good rankings for the target term and Google does not want to show another page of the site and muddy results?
Is there a way to prioritise the group page in Google's eyes? Or bring it to Google's attention? Any suggestions/advice welcome. Thanks in advance Laura0 -
Search engine keyword rank - easiest way to check the keywords that rank across website
What is the best keyword ranking tool you have used? I have used various tools by which I am expected to identify and input the keyword I want to track... However, recently I was introduced to Searchmetrics, which I think automatically pulls in the keywords a website ranks for, without the need for manual input from the SEO (I haven't used this tool yet, so apologies if I am incorrect!). Do any other rank trackers work like this? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
What is Google supposed to return when you submit an image URL into Fetch as Google? Is a few lines of readable text followed by lots of unreadable text normal?
I am seeing something like this (Is this normal?): HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Autoboof
Server: nginx
Content-Type: image/jpeg
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Last-Modified: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:23:04 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1209600
Expires: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:23:55 GMT
X-Request-ID: v-8dd8519e-8a1a-11e5-a595-12313d18b975
X-AH-Environment: prod
Content-Length: 25505
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:24:11 GMT
X-Varnish: 863978362 863966195
Age: 16
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1 ����•JFIF••••��;CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v80), quality = 75
��C•••••••••• •
••
••••••••• $.' ",#(7),01444'9=82<.342��C• ••••
•2!!22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222��•••••v••"••••••��••••••••••••••••
•���•••••••••••••}•••••••!1A••Qa•"q•2���•#B��•R��$3br�
••••%&'()*456789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz���������������������������������������������������������������������������•••••••••••••••••••
•���••••••••••••••w••••••!1••AQ•aq•"2�••B���� #3R�•br�0 -
Keyword Rankings: One keyword dropped, dragging other rankings down. Possible or not?
Hey moz fans, So these week I noticed significant drop in rankings... But what caught my attention is that one specific keyword dropped 18 positions, and all the other just 1-3. Print screen: http://prntscr.com/7fb4g4 Do you think it's possible that the drop of that page, that went 18 positions down, brought the whole domain down? Or is it another cause?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kokolo0 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Long tail rankings
Hi everybody. We've been working with http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/ for some time now. Rankings for broad terms such as 'lawn mowers' and 'lawnmowers' are superb, and we're pretty happy. Bizarrely though, rankings for products are very poor. For example this page - http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/honda-hrg465sd - is currently 17th for 'Honda HRG465SD IZY'. We've done lots of work onsite, clearing up duplicate content, improving copy and tidying up URLs. However, none of this seems to have had a major impact on the product pages. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Why won't my sub-domain blog rank for my brand name in Google?
For six months or so, my team and I have been trying to get our blog to rank on page one in Google for the term "Instabill." The URL, http://blog.instabill.com, is a sub-domain of our company website and they both use the same IP address. Three pages on our www.Instabill.com site rank in the top three spots when searching our brand name in Google. However, our blog ranks 100+. For our blog, we are currently using b2evolution and nginx. We have tried adding static content on the home page, static content in the sidebar, static content on an About Instabill page, and optimizing blog posts for the keyword Instabill, but nothing seems to work. We appreciate any advice you can provide to us. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instabill
Meghan0