Scraped Content on Foreign Language Site. Big deal or not?
-
Hi All,
I've been lurking and learning from this awesome Q&A forum, and I finally have a question. I am working on SEO for an entertainment site that tends to get scraped from time to time. Often, the scraped content is then translated into a foreign language, and posted along with whatever pictures were in the article. Sometimes a backlink to our site is given, sometimes not.
Is scraped content that is translated to a foreign language still considered duplicate content? Should I just let it go, provided a backlink is given?
Thanks!
Jamie -
As Mike has said, the fact that you are often linked to, and the content is translated, would put this far down my priority list as far as SEO goes, in that it's not going to hurt you (unless the site are extremely poor quality and linking to you a high number of times, which doesn't sound like the case here).
I take it they're just lifting the content, not scraping the HTML, given that the content is translated. If they were taking the HTML, you can place the canonical tag in the source code and make it quite likely that they'll publish their version with a canonical tag, pointing to your site.
From a legal point of view, you probably have good claim to go after this behaviour, which is up to you. This should not hurt your SEO, however.
-
Great question. I try to look at it like "is it worth my time?" The fact that it's translated and you sometimes get a link, really kicks it down the priority list for me. You could spend some time going after it, but to what end? If your new pages are generally crawled/indexed quickly, you probably got first authorship already. If you haven't already, you might want to look into how fast your new content gets indexed. If it is a duplicate content issue, it's really their duplicate content issue, depending on the translation factor. I can't see spending any time on it.
Best... Mike
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
-
Site Structure - Is it ok to Keep current flat architecture of existing site pages and use silo structure on two new categories only?
Hi there, I have a site structure flat like this it ranks quite well for its niche site.com/red-apples.html site.com/blue-apples.html The site is branching out into a new but related lines of business is it ok to keep existing site architecture as above while using a silo structure just for the two new different but related business? site.com/meat/red-meat.html site.com/fish/oceant-trout.html Thanks for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | servetea0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hello! We have a lot of duplicate content issues on our website. Most of the pages with these issues are dictionary pages (about 1200 of them). They're not exactly duplicate, but they contain a different word with a translation, picture and audio pronunciation (example http://anglu24.lt/zodynas/a-suitcase-lagaminas). What's the better way of solving this? We probably shouldn't disallow dictionary pages in robots.txt, right? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Implications from portfolio site
I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably. The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered. This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages. Would you go for it and isolate anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
How do I best deal with pages returning 404 errors as they contain links from other sites?
I have over 750 URL's returning 404 errors. The majority of these pages have back links from sites, however the credibility of these pages from what I can see is somewhat dubious, mainly forums and sites with low DA & PA. It has been suggested placing 301 redirects from these pages, a nice easy solution, however I am concerned that we could do more harm than good to our sites credibility and link building strategy going into 2013. I don't want to redirect these pages if its going to cause a panda/penguin problem. Could I request manual removal or something of this nature? Thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Foreign Language Directories
I have a client whose site has each page in multiple languages. each is in specific directories. Needless to say each page is showing up with the same site title, meta data, and content. When my campaigns are crawled they show up as thousands of page errors. Should i add each of these into robots.txt? would this fix the issue of duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gkellyiii0 -
How Does This Site Rank So Well?!
So this website -> http://bailbondsripoffreport.com/ Ranks on the First Page for the term "Bail Bonds" It's the spammiest crappiest piece of junk website ever! lol - How does this site rank so well, it's not even a year old and it's link structure is crap. Can I like report them and have them removed lol. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utahseopros0