Marking our content as original, where the rel=author tag might not be applied
-
Hello,
Can anyone tell, if it is possible to protect text –type content without the rel=author tag?
We host a business listing site, where, apart from the general contact information, we have also started to write original 800+ character-long unique and original contents for the suppliers, where we expect visits, so rankings should be increased.
My issue is that this is a very competitive business, and content crawling is really an everyday practice. Of course, I would like to keep my original content or at least mark it as mine for Google.
The easiest way would be the author tag, but the problem is, that I do not want our names and our photos to be assigned to these contents, because from one hand, we are not acknowledged content providers on our own (no bio and whatsoever), and on the other hand, we provide contents for every sort of businesses, so just having additional links to our other contents, might not help readers to get what they want. I also really do not think that a photo of me could help increase the CTR from the SERP:)
What we currently do, is that we submit every major fresh content through url submission in WMT, hoping that first indexing might help. We have only a handful of them within a day, so not more than 10.
Yes, I could perhaps use absolute links, but this one is not a feasible scenario in all cases, and about DMCA, as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own.
So finally, I do not mind our contents being stolen, as I can’t possibly prevent this. I want however our original content to be recognized as ours by Google, even after the stealing is done.
(Best would be an ’author tag for business’, so connected to our business Google+ page, but I am not aware, this function can be used this way.)
Thank you in advance for all of you, sharing your thoughts with me on the topic.
-
Hi Mat,
You have provided some great clarification, thank you.
Now, I only have one thing to be sorted out:
Should I add the DMCA protection badges to all pages with unique content, as soon as they are created?
My dilemma is, that let's say I find my content somewhere else. I will submit a take down request through DMCA. How it is going to be proven, whose site owns the original content?
I am definetely not an expert in this, but it can easily happen, that my page is not the older one, and the page where my content is placed to, simply just changed its previous content, but the page itself is older than my relevant page.
Thank you
-
Hi András ,
I think that you are getting confused to what rel=author actually does. It can help as part of the picture that shows google who the originator of content is, but it doesn't assert it in the way you seem to be suggesting. I'll come back to that, but let me address another point first:
as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own.
This is plainly wrong. I would agree that whatever you see on the internet can just be stolen. However that is not the same as owning it, something that international law backs up.
If you have valuable content that is likely to get stolen then you need to do 2 things:
1. Ensure that search engines find your copy first and see you as the originator
2. Police it
#1 You seem to be doing. Manual submission via webmaster tools sounds painful to me, but will do that. Tweet it, link it, ping it etc. Do what you can to establish "this was here" early and to get Google to index it.
Part of that same picture is to be seen as trustworthy. Get those high authority citations, ensure you content is always unique etc.
However, #2 is about you taking responsibility for your content. It's yours, you own it, there are no internet police so it is up to you. Try a service like copyscape, or just use google alerts to let you know when people steal stuff. When they do hit them with a take down notice, send the same to their hosts, domain registrar etc - then follow it up with a DMCA request.
This will stop a lot of it. It will also make it a pain in the bum for some of the others (if it is more hassle to steal from you than someone else then they will steal from someone else!). It also starts undermining the trust in their sites. If google have frequent DMCA requests about particular domains it helps build that picture. If you see them stealing other people content let the other victims know as well and encourage them to do the same.
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
-
Community Discussion - Should low-cost content providers be seen as viable options for content marketers?
Hello there, In the latest YouMoz post, "Case Study: How We Gained More than 100 Links for a Travel Website via Content Marketing," Tom McLoughlin recommends an idea for content creation that is sure to elicit strong opinions from all sides: "Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are fantastic resources for finding freelancers who do great work. It simply takes a bit of initial time to sift through and separate the wheat from the chaff. Once that’s done, give the freelancers a detailed brief and tell them exactly what you want." What's your opinion? Have you had good experiences using these sites? If so, what have you found as the keys to making the working relationship a success.
Content Development | | ronell-smith1 -
Duplicate Content
Hi Does anyone know a site where i can paste text to test for duplication? We've used some outstanding freelancer copywriters in the past but need to check the authenticity of the article created before publishing, Thanks Gary
Content Development | | GaryVictory0 -
Is paid content a good or bad thing
Hi, over the past couple of years we have turned down thousands of request from companies to have paid editorial on our sites, I have always turned this down but i have seen some sites accept this and would like to know your stance on this. In newspapers and magazines which i have worked in both, they have paid editorial all the time, so i am just wondering what google thinks of paid editorial. look forward to hearing your thoughts
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Evergreen content: Dedicated section or blog posts?
As part of our content strategy we are creating an ongoing series of articles to help both our potential buyers and our users learn about our product and improve their knowledge of industry best practices in general. Internally, we've had some debate as to where we should host this content within our site. We've identified two approaches: Series of blog posts Dedicated knowledge section of the website If we go with the first approach, we would created a dedicated section that indexed all the blog posts. If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition. Is there any difference, SEO wise with the two approaches? What would you recommend? Thanks, Darren.
Content Development | | dgibbons0 -
RSS feeds with dup content and titles
Hi, For my Buddypress site I use a tool to create sites with RSS feeds. Each site is for a different feed, but the number of dup tiles and content is running in the thousands. I've been trying to reduce the dups, but have begun to think there is more trouble from such content than benefit. Should I dump the content or ignore the errors flagged by SEOMOZ? Any ideas if thes RSS feed dups are hurting my BuddyPress site? Any suggestions in general about how to eliminate such dupe for a Buddypress Site, eg. the activity log. Larry
Content Development | | tishimself0 -
Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search. These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as: Order to [City] today. So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good. However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose. We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have: Italy Page (Unique Content) Rome (Duplicate Content) Milan (Duplicate Content) Venice (Duplicate Content) etc. (Duplicate Content) For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop. So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
Content Development | | TME_Digital0 -
Tagging Your Blog Posts - Useful?
Has anyone demonstrated measurable value from routinely tagging your posts? I am of the mindset that what is good for a user/reader is good for SEO and therefore the posts should be tagged. I wanted to see if anyone else had specific experience to the positive or negative.
Content Development | | SWKurt0 -
New Content
I am looking to add new content to pages that I currently have on my website. The content on these pages was taken from another provider and my idea is to rewrite the content to make it unique. Because it is duplicate content, these pages don't get much traffic. Should I add the new content to brand new urls or just change the content on these (already indexed urls). The issue has seen these pages contain duplicate content. If the content simply changes, will it recognise these pages as having unique content?
Content Development | | MattBB121