Duplicate Content

[CYNOT]

Let's say a blog is publishing original content.  Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own.  Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years.

How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results?  Any opinions?

[sarahwalsh]

Removing any duplicate text is absolutely essential, as this could potentially negatively affect your business's organic SEO, do you have any duplicated text?

[CYNOT]

Thanks for the response Peter re: the original post.

We are very convinced at this point the issue isn't a technical one.  We're not sure however if there's an issue with that duplicate content site we found stealing some of our articles, or as you mentioned a quality score issue.  We're approaching it as a need to re-group around the quality issue for now, and monitor results over time.  We've identified several areas for improvement in that regard.

This stuff is so frustrating to be honest.  I get why Google can't show their cards, but the complete lack of transparency or ability to get some feedback from them makes this a difficult game.

Thanks again for the response, much appreciated.

[Dr-Pete]

CYNOT: I saw the original question via email (I'll avoid details in the public answer), and unfortunately I'm not seeing any clear signs of technical issues with the original content. This looks more like an aggressive filter than a penalty, but it's really hard to tell if the filter is a sign of quality issues or if Google is treating the wrong site as a duplicate.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, a lot of it does depend on the relative authority of the sites. People scrape (including some bots, which do it almost immediately) Moz posts all the time, and they rank, but they don't have nearly our link profile or other ranking signals, and so we don't worry about it. For a smaller site with a relatively new or weak link profile, though, it is possible for a stronger site to outrank you on your own content.

Google does try to look at cache dates and other signals, but a better-funded site can often get indexed more quickly as well. It's rare for this to do serious damage, but it can happen. As Balachandar said, at that point you may have to resort to DMCA take-down requests and other legal actions. Ultimately, that becomes a cost/benefit trade-off, as legal action is going to take time and money.

There's no technical tricks (markup, etc.) to tell Google that a page is the source, although there are certainly tactics, like maintaining good XML sitemaps, that can help Google find your new content more quickly. Of course, you also want to be the site that has that stronger link profile, regardless of whether or not someone is copying you.

[ibalachandar]

It will affect your ranking if the second blog steals your content. If the second blog which had stealed your content have high DA, your content will be under-valued. Google updating the algorithms by analyzing which website posts the content in web(date analysis) to solve this problem. You can see traffic drops as an indication to identify that the page is duplicated by some other blogs. If you have big website and many blog posts, you can use DMCA which takes care of all the things. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.