Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Other websites copy content and giving a link back
-
Hi,
I've just noticed a few back links in Google Search Console, I was excited. But when I saw the backlinks, 2 other websites that had completely copied my content and then gave a backlink to my website.
Is this bad for SEO and would google penalise my website for this?
-
In my opinion it is bad to allow infringing content to appear on other websites. These are duplicate content. It is possible that they will outrank you in the SERPs or result in your page being filtered from the search results. Also, if you work hard to produce this content then you want people coming to your site to see it - not to the websites of others. If it appears on websites all over the web then why should people visit your website? Finally, if these folks use the content and give you an attribution link, that communicates to everyone who sees it that your content is available for reuse.
Google says that they are good at recognizing the original source of content, however, I know from experience that they are far from perfect. Some SEOs believe Google, and advise clients to distribute their content as a way of earning links. I would not listen to them.
We tell infringers to take our content down and when they don't comply we either submit DMCA to Google, their revenue source and their hosting - or we have an attorney send them notice. We are sending out three notices today.
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
-
Back links from seller review platforms
I did a back link research on one of our competitors and saw a back link from resellerratings.com listed as back link from a high authority website. My question is do any of these review platforms shopper approved, resellerratings, or trust pilot gurantee a do follow back link if i create an account with them? if so, which one?
Link Building | | Swifttechbuy0 -
Internal Linking - Post links vs Side Bar Links behaving differently
Hi, I have a question regarding the internal linking behavior. My website is www.hindimeaning.com which is approx 3 years old. I have approx 450 posts. Now i have a widget on right sidebar "Popular posts". A widget below my posts "Related Posts". And a simple html CSS menu above the posts (I removed menu around 6 month before so currently it will not show.) I crawled my site with moz crawler (same are the result from google crawler as well) and it shows menus links as internal links. While sidebar widget "Popular posts" and "Related Posts" are not showing as internal links. If we talk theoretically what i learn till now is "every link on a page behaves as internal link". Then why the widget links are not showing as internal links. Thanks, Mahesh Kumar
Link Building | | chaudhary04890 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1 That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links. I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs. I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio. Am I correct about that? Thanks,
Link Building | | tcolling
Tim PS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim0 -
Image only badges giving link juice!?!?
I see some chatter about badges, but no clear definition. A collegue of mine instituted badges on clients website, but these badges are only an image w/ hyperlink; no textual content. He is confident that this has worked successfully before as a link building strategy, which blew my mind. I thought we needed some text, and obviously optimizes anchor text for biggest benefit. Are these simple badges helpful, or do we need some html in there!? He also routes them through bit.ly to track impressions and clicks.. does that have any effect as well? Thanks!
Link Building | | SwissNinja0 -
Asking other websites to link your website when the want to be in your directory
Hello, We have 3 web directories, and I wonder if it is legal for search engines to ask people who want to be in the directory to link to a particular website in order to be in our directory. I mean, it is free adding the url in the directory but if they lwant to be in the directory they have to ink to a website we have decided.
Link Building | | teconsite.com
Is this correct, or is punishable? Thanks!0