Steps you can take to ensure your content is indexed and registered to your site before a scraper gets to it?
-
Hi,
A clients site has significant amounts of original content that has blatantly been copied and pasted in various other competitor and article sites.
I'm working with the client to rejig lots of this content and to publish new content.
What steps would you recommend to undertake when the new, updated site is launched to ensure Google clearly attributes the content to the clients site first?
One thing I will be doing is submitting a new xml + html sitemap.
Thankyou
-
There are no "best practices" established for the tags' usage at this point. On the one hand, it could technically be used for every page, and on the other, should only be used when it's an article, blog post, or other individual person's writing.
-
Thanks Alan.
Guess there's no magic trick that will give you 100% attribution.
Regarding this tag, do you recommend I add this to EVERY page of the clients website including the homepage? So even the usual about us/contact etc pages?
Cheers
Hash
-
Google continually tries to find new ways to encourage solutions for helping them understand intent, relevance, ownership and authority. It's why Schema.org finally hit this year. None of their previous attempts have been good enough, and each has served a specific individual purpose.
So with Schema, the theory is there's a new, unified framework that can grow and evolve, without having to come up with individual solutions.
The "original source" concept was supposed to address the scraper issue, and there's been some value in that, though it's far from perfect. A good scraper script can find it, strip it out or replace the contents.
rel="author" is yet one more thing that can be used in the overall mix, though Schema.org takes authorship and publisher identity to a whole new, complex, and so far confused level :-).
Since Schema.org is most likely not going to be widely adopted til at least early next year, Google's encouraging use of the rel="author" tag as the primary method for assigning authorship at this point, and will continue to support it even as Schema rolls out.
So if you're looking at a best practices solution, yes, rel="author" is advisable. Until it's not.
-
Thanks Alan... I am surprised to learn about this "original source" information. There must not have been a lot of talk about it when it was released or I would have seen it.
Google recently started encouraging people to use the rel="author" attribute. I am going to use that on my site... now I am wondering if I should be using "original source" too.
Are you recommending rel="author"?
Also, reading that full post there is a section added at the end recommending rel="canonical"
-
Always have a sitemap.xml file with all the URLs you want indexed included in it. Right after publishing, submit the sitemap.xml file (or files if there are tens of thousands of pages) through Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. Include the Meta "original-source" tag in your page headers.
Include a Copyright line at the bottom of each page with the site or company name, and have that link to the home page.
This does not guarantee with 100% certainty that you'll get proper attribution, however these are the best steps you can take in that regard.
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
-
Did not get Good reply on my previous query. Can anyone help me?
I did not get satisfactory answer on my previous question here - https://moz.com/community/q/please-provide-solution-for-my-website-duplicate-content-problem Please help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
Geographic site clones and duplicate content penalties
We sell wedding garters, niche I know! We have a site (weddinggarterco.com) that ranks very well in the UK and sell a lot to the USA despite it's rudimentary currency functions (Shopify makes US customers checkout in £gbp; not helpful to conversions). To improve this I built a clone (theweddinggarterco.com) and have faked a kind of location selector top right. Needless to say a lot of content on this site is VERY similar to the UK version. My questions are... 1. Is this likely to stop me ranking the USA site? 2. Is this likely to harm my UK rankings? Any thoughts very welcome! Thanks. Mat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
How do I get my Golf Tee Times pages to index?
I understand that Google does not want to index other search results pages, but we have a large amount of discount tee times that you can search for and they are displayed as helpful listing pages, not search results. Here is an example: http://www.activegolf.com/search-northern-california-tee-times?Date=8%2F21%2F2013&datePicker=8%2F21%2F2013&loc=San+Diego%2C+CA&coupon=&zipCode=&search= These pages are updated daily with the newest tee times. We don't exactly want every URL with every parameter indexed, but at least http://www.activegolf.com/search-northern-california-tee-times. It's weird because all of the tee times are viewable in the HTML and are not javascript. An example of similar pages would be Yelp, for example this page is indexed just fine - http://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=dogwalkers&find_loc=Lancaster%2C+MA I know ActiveGolf.com is not as powerful as Yelp but it's still strange that none of our tee times search pages are being indexed. Would appreciate any ideas out there!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CAndrew14.0 -
How can this site rank post panda/penguin?
I am doing link building for an adult dating comparison website. One of the main competitors though, having checked their backlink profile have anchor text that is not varied at all. In fact many, many links that are all the same. How can they possibly rank in the post panda/penguin era? In fact they're at number 2! The site is an adult site and it www.f hypen buddy.co.uk if anyone wants to runa backlink check on OSE. Any help greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Avoiding duplicate content on an ecommerce site
Hi all, I have an ecommerce site which has a standard block of text on 98% of the product pages. The site also has a blog. Because these cause duplicate content and duplicate title issues respectively, how can I ever get around this? Would having the standard text on the product pages displayed as an image help? And how can I stop the blog being listed as duplicate titles without a nofollow? We already have the canonical attribute applied to some areas where this is appropriate e.g. blog and product categories. Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMoore850 -
Getting a site to rank in both google.com and google.co.uk
I have a client who runs a yacht delivery company. He gets business from the US and the UK but due to the nature of his business, he isn't really based anywhere except in the middle of the ocean somewhere! His site is hosted in the US, and it's a .com. I haven't set any geographical targeting in webmaster tools either. We're starting to get some rankings in google US, but very little in google UK. It's a small site anyway, and he'd prefer not to have too much content on the site saying he's UK based as he's not really based anywhere. Any ideas on how best to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital0