Content Scrapers Ranking Above Own Site With Plagarized Content - How to fix?

[James664]

Hi there,

With one of my sites, which has seemed to be hit hard by the Product Reviews update in April, I ran a number of my articles through Copyscape to check for plagiarized content and found that a large number of our articles are being outranked by content-scraper websites - which have essentially copy and pasted the same article on their website, and it is ranking above. It seems the plagiarized content is time-stamping the original article on the same date and time.

This is happening for over 20 articles for their main respective keywords, where plagiarized content is outranking the original content. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this, or notify Google that this is happening? It seems site-wide we are being outranked by content scrapers. Could it be possible that Google has mistakenly flagged our content for plagiarism and thus could contribute to a sharp decline in rankings since April?

Thanks in advance!

 

[harrytwatter]

Sorry for the obvious but first must ask, do you have canonical tags on your pages? I think this would be the first question Google would ask if posited this question.

I'm curious about the scrapers, has anyone read a case study where some scrapper made $10K overnight or something? It seems like they are more prolific than ever and I can't help but expect that to be driven by somer kernel of profitability.

You could try posting in the Webmaster forums or tagging the official G squad on Twitter, they do occasionally engage.

 

[James664]

Thanks for the reply, the website is built with Wordpress and uses Yoast for general SEO etc - I just checked and all posts do have canonical tags.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you have canonical tags you should at least get any credit for any links, although the canonical tag is a suggestion only.

The route would be to send takedown notices to the hosts and if they don't respond (could be outside of your country or whatever) then hit up the registrar. You can also send notices into Google.

Giant annoyance and time sink but if it's affecting your bottomline then it should be done. Google needs to do something about ranking "syndicated" content above the original.

 

[CCarter]

I talked about this some weeks back, no matter how much propaganda Google pushes blackhat and greyhat techniques still work. They never were eradicated or went away. All that the blackhat/greyhat SEOs did was stop talking about them openly, and therefore the SEO news sites stopped writing about them because their source stopped feeding them easy info.

But all the blackhats and greyhats I've known are still in the trenches and making more money now than ever. They just know how to keep their mouths shut this time around.

Last time around they would openly talk about the techniques they discovered, and then others would go post about them on forums, create BST services, create blog threads - all in an effort to out the technique. Well a couple of Google algo updates, and you saw some quelling of the techniques, but a lot have come back stronger than ever.

One day we'll even see "Linkwheels" return to dominance, if they haven't already.