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I have an electronics niche news website.  A scraper who had an online store selling products in my niche copied every one of my articles and posted them on his site under the heading "News" ... generally within 1/2 hour of me posting them on my site.  His site was even showing up in the rankings before mine.  I filed a copyright infringement claim with Google two weeks ago via their online form explaining what he was doing.  Today, I received an email from Google saying that they have reviewed his site and have delisted it from the search engine.  I just checked, and he is GONE ... completely delisted, no trace.  My site traffic has also jumped at least 25% today.  It pays to complain!

Just sharing

Yes ... brought it all in house to ensure that we stayed 100% whitehat.  Spent A LOT of time removing and disavowing spammy links.  Once that was completed, rankings IMMEDIATELY rose causing our quality content to actually be seen by people.  Our content was high quality and unique which resulted in it immediately being linked to by big sites like CNN, Fortune, WSJ, etc which caused 1,000 little niche sites to link to it as well which resulted in an even bigger boost.  When everything went bad, it went bad quickly ... and when everything went right, it shot up like a rocket.  They key, as everyone else says, seems to be to provide well structured quality content and the rankings will take care of themselves.  

Most important thing I have learned so far:  Provide quality content that is well structured according to the principles found here on Moz and your rankings and backlinks will take care of themselves.  If I had done that from the beginning when I started in March, my sites would be 3 to 4 times more successful than they are now.  All it takes is a week or two to read and watch EVERYTHING that this site has to offer ...

Great question.  I, too, thought that setting up Google authorship was supposed to prevent this from happening.  I have the same problem with both legitimate republishing and with scrapers who sometimes get ranked higher even when posting just part of my articles.  Also, my Google plus blurbs and links to my articles get ranked in the #1 spot and my original article will end up on page 10.  Google is whacky ...

Still don't quite get mozcast yet ... maybe I better read the "About" section again

Many of my tags rank higher than my actual articles for particular keywords ... some even rank #1.  Not sure what to do about that ...

A page that is specifically designed to rank for a particular keyword or group of keywords ...