Site scraped over 400,000 urls
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Our business is heavily dependent on SEO traffic from long tail search. We have over 400,000 pieces of content, all of which we found scraped and published by another site based out of Hong Kong (we're in the US).
Google has a process for DMCA takedown, but doing so would be beyond tedious for such a large set of urls. The scraped content is outranking us in many searches and we've noticed a drastic decrease in organic traffic, likely from a duplicate content penalty.
Has anyone dealt with an issue like this? I can't seem to find much help online.
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Hi Kibin
Firstly it's unlikely that their scraped content will affect your rankings - Google generally knows who originated it. However:
Do you have the hreflang tag on your website? specifying your language and location? If theirs has this as well then technically you are targetting a different country, so there should be no duplicate content if you added it.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
I would tell Google about the URL and add a sample 10 URLs first: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard. Telling them is an absolute must even if it's only a few URLs.
Also email the hosting company informing them that they are hosting copied content and that the penalties are severe.
Finally, write to the company themselves and tell them/warn them that you are going legal and send them a cease and desist legal letter. I am sure you can knock one up for a few dollars from a friendly solicitor.
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGc_jc3Oznk It's a bit long but worth it.
Do all of these things.
Regards
Nigel
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