Remove Scraped Content?
-
There is a site I work for that has content that, when you search in Google a snippet of text from, they are not the top result for. I believe what has happened is that they had written blogs and articles and added them to their site and article directories at the same time and the article directories got cached first.
If we're not coming up first for our article, that means we are not believed to be the original author, correct?
Should I remove all content from our site where this is happening, even though we actually did create these articles?
-
I explained the answer to this in the second part of my original post.
-
I would hope you had a link, when possible, back to your site. If not, then the page should be dated by creation and last update which Google can see. Although I would not leave anything up to guess work, but make sure you have links, and I would even put the date it was posted onto the post on your site like news article are. Just another indicator.
I would not remove the content if in fact, it did originate from you.
-
Yes, it was intentionally distributed. I would like to know whether the duplicate content on our site is being seen (by Google) as copied, not original, scraped, pulled from another source because we're so lazy we can't come up with any material of our own??
If this is the case, I will be removing the content, as the quality of the content sucks and there is quite a bit of it. Please, do not respond "if the content sucks, then why have it on your site..."
-
The term "scraped content" is most often used for content that has been grabbed from your website by a visiting robot.
Based upon your posting, the duplicate content that you are talking about was intentionally distributed.
-
Then how do you determine if Google is seeing content as scraped? As you know, Google has made it very clear recently how they feel about scraped content.
-
If we're not coming up first for our article, that means we are not believed to be the original author, correct?
Search engines can not identify original authors. (unless you use the rel="author" attribute and then they are merely taking your word for it) They only know which page with the content was discovered first. The content could have been on other pages first or the content could have been published first offline. Search engines don't have divine powers
The page that ranks first in the SERPs is the one that has the best combination of relevance, domain authority and other ranking factors. Has nothing to do with authorship.
Should I remove all content from our site where this is happening, even though we actually did create these articles?
I would not do that if the content is valuable for your visitors, has acquired links from other sites or if the content is pulling traffic from search.
The take-away from this is not to give your content away if you want to rank for it in search. Giving it away can create strong competitors and feed existing competitors.
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
-
How much do I have to differentiate syndicated content, exactly?
We have about 15-20 articles we'll repurpose on a partner domain (think: media outlet). To avoid duplicate content suspicion, how much exactly do we need to differentiate the content on the second domain? Yea, this is assuming we can't obtain a canonical for whatever reason. I've found some good advice here, but am looking for some quantification. Like: "A sentence/paragraph of introduction at the top of the piece, plus a link back to the original at the end of said introduction ought to do it." Any help is appreciated. Thanks! Tim
Content Development | | Jen_Floyd0 -
Content Duplication Issue On Content Publishing Site
I am running Free Article Posting site but I discover people are posting their content which already has been published on different sites before. What should i need to do in order to save my site from Google penalty.3 waiting for your kind help in this regard Thanks in advance
Content Development | | Mustansar0 -
Images & Duplicate Content Issues
Here's a scenario for you: The site is running WordPress and the images are uploaded to the media section. You can set image attributes there such as the Description & Alt Tag. Let's say you'd like to reuse the same image in two different blog posts. The image keeps the same Description & Alt Tag associated with it in the media section. Would this be considered duplicate content? What would be the best practice in this case to reuse the same image in multiple posts?
Content Development | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
Video content sites
In addition to you tube are there any other video sites worth uploading content to? Such as Vimeo? Are these any good or is you tube the only place worth publishing
Content Development | | Hardley1110 -
Duplicate Content behind a Paywall
We have a website that is publicly visible. This website has content. We'd like to take that same content, put it on another website, behind a paywall. Since Google will not be able to crawl those pages behind the paywall is there any risk to ua doing this? Thanks! Mike
Content Development | | FOTF_DigitalMarketing0 -
Content
I'm curious what people are paying when they outsource content writing. I'm thinking about outsourcing some writing. I'm looking for the best quality content on the web, nothing medicore or average! What do you guys pay?
Content Development | | PeterM220 -
Help with Content Revamp
Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused. We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful. I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles. As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for -Longboard Surfboards -Funboard Surfboards -Mini Malibu Surfboards -Retro Fish Surfboards -Womens Surfboards -Beginner Surfboards My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words? What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?
Content Development | | isle_surf0 -
Why is this store getting hurt in SERPs when they removed duplicate content?
I work with an e-commerce client who got hit hard by Panda. They are very cautious, and want small-scale tests to prove each hypothesis before committing to larger changes. Recently, we reworked content on 30 product detail pages. Before, these product pages featured some original content mixed with some manufacturer content. The change we made was to remove the manufacturer content completely from the product page, leaving about 300 words of high-quality, original content--all of which was written by subject matter experts. I assumed that Google viewed this manufacturer text as duplicate content. However, when these 30 modified pages were compared to the control, they performed significantly worse. Question 1: Does any have any idea why these pages would perform worse than the control?
Content Development | | merch_zzounds
Question 2: Do you have any tips for convincing this client to try another test or get the buy-in to make the larger changes that--in theory--need to happen? FWIW, this client has about 10,000 product detail pages--the vast majority of which contain just manufacturer content. I appreciate your thoughts.0