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
-
Selling same products under separate brands and can't consolidate sites...duplicate content issues?
I have a client selling home goods online and in-store under two different brand names in separate regions of the country. Currently, the websites are completely identical aside from branding. It is unlikely that they would have the capacity to write unique titles and page content for each website (~25,000 pages each), and the business would never consolidate the sites. Would it make sense to use canonical tags pointing to the higher-performing website on category and product pages? This way we could continue to capture branded search to the lesser brand while consolidating authority on the better performing website. What would you do?
Technical SEO | | jluke.fusion0 -
keywords are not ranking as per the expectation and need site review too
Hello, Recently We have a taken a project " http://customerconnect-services.com/ " and are responsible for the Digital Marketing for the website. FYI, we have been following the best On-Page SEO practices ever since we took the project: Performing Keyword Research, Finalizing the Keywords,Using those in the Page-Title, Meta-Descriptions, Heading Tags and of course in the Content as per MOZ suggestions & SEO standards. But, we are unable to rank in first page; all the considered keywords have a ranking of 51+ which is a serious matter of concern for us. We have also checked whether the Domain / URL has been blacklisted, but it's not (Not even by Google). We are therefore unable to figure out what is going wrong even after following so many best practices to get the keywords a good ranking (1st & 2nd page of SERPs). Therefore I would like to request you to provide your expert opinions in this regard by checking what is it that we are not getting right. The website url is http://customerconnect-services.com/. As this is a high-priority issue for us & the client is a prestigious one of course, please help. Looking forward to hearing from you at the earliest. Thanks & Regards,
Technical SEO | | Harini.M
Harini2 -
Is it problematic for Google when the site of a subdomain is on a different host than the site of the primary domain?
The Website on the subdomain runs on a different server (host) than the site on the main domain.
Technical SEO | | Christian_Campusjaeger0 -
Ranking Drop
hey guys, I know there is always someone here asking this questions, but I have done my fair share of investigation and have not come up with a cause. my ranking dropped from page one to page 2 or 3 last sunday in time span of 4 hours. After that I read that google was updating panda with 4.1, but don't know why I got hit exactly. my competition is all clear and some have even gained rankings, and mine dropped even though my domain and page authority increased as well. any ideas would help. I already checked all the obvious ones (such as spam, links, content, etc)
Technical SEO | | s-s1 -
Page Content
Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0 -
Ecommerce site with currency selectors giving dupe content?
Hi everyone,
Technical SEO | | BeachDude
One of my ecommerce sites uses BigCommerce. They have a feature where you can add different currency buttons to change the currency that the customer can shop as. This is great because if people from the UK visit our site, they can change the currency to their own rather than US. It just ads a variable on the end of the URL string to change the currency. However, in my webmaster tools I noticed that I think i am getting a bunch of duplicate content. For example, it thinks i have duplicate title tags for the following: domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=1
.domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=2
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=3
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=4 I thought about adding "rel=no-follow" but unfortunately I don't have access to this file to edit the code. Any suggestions?0