Sites Copying my Content Ranking Higher
-
A number of sites are copying - either 100% word for word, paragraphs, or sentences of my content and are ranking higher.
Some sites are doing this with permission/properly and are linking back to my article Others are not linking back or giving credit.
Some of these sites, in some cases are ranking higher than me in Google results.
What can I do?
-
It will make an impact. I have had authorship set up for months now and it has made a difference to click-throughs. Basically I have more traffic now than before. And I believe this is partly due to the photo in the SERPs.
We put an authorship plugin together for WordPress as we needed to implement authorship on our own sites and client sites. It's free - you can try it if you feel you can't or don't want to do it manually. http://www.authorsure.com.
-
Ben, you can read this thread.
-
Thanks. Is that an automatic thing if I meet the guidelines? Cant see how to sign up for it..
-
Take a look at First Click Free from google.
-
Thanks.
I'm going to try to set up the author profiles and see what happens with that. I gain something from most of the people sharing my content (not as much as I lose from them ranking above me) so I'd rather just find a way to get myself above them 9 times out of 10 and that seems like a great option. Hopefully that will reduce any impact of Panda changes?
-
Hi EGOL,
I am having the same issue also, these websites are not out ranking me for a particular keyword, however if I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text into Google on one of my product pages lots of other websites are above my listing that has copied my content, even though my page has higher authority and PR.
Should I be worrying about this?
Kind Regards
-
do a search for "wp content protect", you'll have to be cautios because those plugins can harm your seo strategy.
-
Agreed, he needs to evolve a strategy that is based on 2 things:
a) Claiming authorship of his original content
b) Devising ways to prevent content theft
At the same time, if his site was inflicted with a Panda-penalty, he will make a lot of gains using authorship.
-
One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content.
I believe that this is a very good idea. However, I am confident that it will not solve the problem. Google is not giving strong weight to claimed authorship at this time.
Your strongest weapon is DMCA actions and to stop giving others permission to use your content.
Your site could be suffering from Panda ranking reductions as a result of your own content being wild on the web.
-
Ok. Thanks... you think this would make a big impact in general with search engine results?
-
That is correct.
-
Headshot and real persons name?
Thx
-
It wont work without a proper headshot.
-
But is there a way to set it so that it wont show my name/picture?
Thanks
-
The author profile is just a way to authenticate yourself to Google. If you have the ability to set profiles for other people of your company, you should be fine.
-
Can I do author profile without using my name? I have stuff written by other people/don't include my name on the site.
-
It must look different where you are. I get the exact match domain, haaretz.com, then a couple of copies of mine, and then mine.
I'll look at the author profile.
-
There is not a simple solution for your particular case. Your site ranks below an exact match domain and another site that is haaretz.com. It would be very difficult to rank above chriscornell.com as it is an exact match domain.
Haaretz.com has a domain authority of 91, while your site's domain authority is 40. Until you tell the search engines that the content posted on haaretz.com is originally yours, it would seem difficult for your site to outrank haaretz.com
As a first step, I will setup an author profile using g+. That should give you more visits since your author profile information should include headshot as well.
Besides this, I don't thin there are many options that are available off the table. You will need to work on improving your site's overall authority.
-
Thanks. I'm using Wordpress, what would you suggest?
-
Thanks for the reply. The site url is www.touristisrael.com and an example is if you Google:
"Chris Cornell in Israel" or
"Chris Cornell in Tel Aviv"
Do you mean author profiles on Google +?
-
Do you mind sharing your site's URL? One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content. It would be a way to tell Google that it's your content.
It may take a few weeks time for things to settle down.
-
Try using some plugins to protect your content if you're using any cms, it's not enough but it's a start...
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
-
Is content on widget bar less 'seo important' than main content?
hi, i wonder if content on widget bar less 'seo important' than main content.. i mean, is better to place content and links on main cotent than on wordpress widget bar? What are the pros and cons? tx!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Devaluing certain content to push better content forward
Hi all, I'm new to Moz, but hoping to learn a lot from it in hopes of growing my business. I have a pretty specific question and hope to get some feedback on how to proceed with some changes to my website. First off, I'm a landscape and travel photographer. My website is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com - you can see that the navigation quickly spreads out to different photo galleries based on location. So if a user was looking for photos from California, they would find galleries for Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, the Redwoods and San Francisco. At this point, there are probably 600-800 photos on my website. At last half of these are either older or just not quite up to par with the quality I'm starting to feel like I should produce. I've been contemplating dumbing down the galleries, and not having it break down so far. So instead of four sub-galleries of California, there would just be one California gallery. In some cases, where there are lots of good images in a location, I would probably keep the sub-galleries, but only if there were dozens of images to work with. In the description of each photo, the exact location is already mentioned, so I'm not sure there's a huge need for these sub-galleries except where there's still tons of good photos to work with. I've been contemplating building a sort of search archive. Where the best of my photos would live in the main galleries, and if a user didn't find what they were looking for, they could go and search the archives for older photos. That way they're still around for licensing purposes, etc. while the best of the best are pushed to the front for those buying fine art prints, etc. These pages for these search archives would probably need to be de-valued somehow, so that the main galleries would be more important SEO-wise. So for the California galleries, four sub-galleries of perhaps 10 images each would become one main California gallery with perhaps 15 images. The other 25 images would be thrown in the search archive and could be searched by keyword. The question I have - does this sound like a good plan, or will I really be killing my site when it comes to SEO by making such a large change? My end goal would be to push my better content to the front, while scaling back a lot of the excess. Hopefully I explained this question well. If not, I can try to elaborate further! Thanks, Mickey
Technical SEO | | msphotography0 -
Why my site is not ranking for any of the keywords?
We have a site for Property management software, we have done everything like set proper Title and descriptions, heading tags, robots tag is also ok, set schema and its ok with Google webmaster too also we are doing Social media promotion. can you please check our website and tell me what is the problem??
Technical SEO | | rootwaysinc0 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Linking out to authoritive sites from my ecommerce site
Good afternoon SEOmoz community. I was looking for a specific answer or advice or opinion about linking out to other sites. My Site www.tacticalbootstore.com has been undergoing a complete content rewrite. In the process we have been told and read where it can be good to link out to other authoritive sites. One of the pages we have rewritten is here. http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-sizing-chart-a-97.html We have not added the graphics yet as they are being built now. This is just an informational page about sizing of a particular manufacturers boots. Once you get to the bottom of the text we have added a link to the actual manufacturers page. Is this helpful for us in the SERPS or not? Thank you for your time. Chris
Technical SEO | | scamper0 -
Why am I ranking for this
In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
A site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues.
A reasonably large ecommerce site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues. On 4 or 5 keyword domains related to site content the owners simply duplicated the home page with category links pushing visitors to the category pages of the main site. There was no canonical URL instruction, so have set preferred url via webmaster tools but now need to code this into the website itself. For a reasonably large ecommerce site, how would you approach that particular nest of troubles. That's even before we get to grips with the on page duplication and wrong keywords!
Technical SEO | | SkiBum0 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0