Normally, I would not post this, but I feel obligated to bring to light a disturbing and unprofessional duplication of original Internet content that is becoming more pervasive. I will not state who is doing so or the particular details and location of where it is occurring. I just want others to be aware of the practice and how it can adversely affect them.
It was just brought to my attention that a BBS owner has taken content from our website and posted it in a blog format of their Forum. This will hurt our search engine optimization, SEO. There was also a failure to reference where the content came from in the re-posting. As your website is assumed copyrighted whether it states so or not, this is first and foremost a violation of copyright standards. Unless permission is granted in writing others should not be copying it. For clarity our site is copyrighted.
After I reviewed the re-posting of our content I noticed that many others have had their content re-posted by this person. This is the reason I wanted to bring attention to this practice. Google does not like duplicate content and will lower SEO rankings for it. If you are allowing re-post of your original content keep in mind that the content should be at least different by about 20% so that Google will not lower your ranking. I don’t want to see others hurt through lack of knowledge and understanding of what this will do to their SEO.
Plus, I am not certain about this but I do believe that collective effect of re-posting so much new content from others original content will in turn drive up the SEO of this individual’s BBS. I would assume that others are being told that when their content starts to come up in search results this will help them get found. I don’t know if that is true but I personally would want to be found on my own site with my original content. In other words, it will help the overall SEO of the BBS and hurt the owner of the original content.
Lastly, from a personal perspective, I am deeply disappointed that an individual such as this would so effortlessly take countless hours of research; years of professional experience; and the painstaking efforts it took to write this original content and callously cut and paste it to their own site with a glaring omission that it came from someone else’s work; thus having the reader assume it is their own content. It’s sad that this individual cannot stand on the merits of their own experiences, efforts and work; instead choosing to take from others and indirectly claims it as their own.
Michael, thanks for sharing, this is good info. You should consider letting people know who has done this, if several people’s content has been copied. That way people can make sure their content hasn’t been stolen.
[FONT=inherit]Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place ((What Is A URL And Why Do They Matter For SEO? - Moz)). This is a problem because when there are more than one piece of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original (or best).[/FONT]
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[FONT=inherit][h=3]Three of the biggest issues with duplicate content include:[/h]
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[]Search engines don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
[]Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, [URL=“http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank”]authority, [URL=“http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text”]anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
[*]Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results
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[FONT=inherit]When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses and search engines provide less relevant results.[/FONT]
Does it have to be the first sentences or two in your webpage?? I don’t know anything about this except to say apparently there’s some type of rift going on in Facebook about this so I’ve been told.
I find this crazy if it’s that easy to take away someone’s writings on there website for another’s benefit. It’s a flaw in the system where you may want to consider on going to your local “District attorneys office” since this is happening to your website at your place of employment and your IP address,but since it’s really more then that because it’s the net which is far reaching they may send you to the attorney generals office. I would also lodge a complaint with google. I have no clue who could have done this Michael and I’m hoping it’s not someone I know but if it’s done to you and Micah then it’s probably done to alot or others. If this person(s) takes it off there site after you told then to do so then that should suffice because law enforcement is getting swallowed up with layoffs and nit having the ability to search every case as thoroughly as they should he able to.
The very least I would report this to the google complaint dep’t)if they have one and also your attorney to find out what your rights are. The goal is for the person(s) to stop and more importantly for Google to fix this easy “theft” that even most kids can do. It’s like having free access to take candy out of the candy jar with no repercussions except for positive gain to the person(s) who did this.
Ron quickly deleted the blog after I asked him to on Facebook. It was 100% copy and pasted from my site, a page dedicated to solar panel cleaning. The site automatically ranked well, long before he posted his blog. There are many, if not hundreds, of blogs that he has posted that are duplicates of other contractors sites. After removing the blog I asked him to delete, Ron went on a posting rampage about how he was helping my SEO for free and that I was only hurting my rankings…
I don’t buy that for a minute. This blogging is helping PWI rank well. When you search Google for solar panel Greenville, you’ll find my site and you’ll find the blog Ron posted using my content. If you click on the that link, it takes you to the blog posting on PWI. Now whose SEO did that help? It took them to the PWI site - where they can now see my information, along with all my compitetions! If Ron never stole my content and blogged about it, a potential customer would simply go to my site, never knowing about PWI - that’s what I’d prefer… Wouldn’t you?
So now Ron has hundreds of people looking for service from all over the country visiting PWI from blogs that were copy and pasted from hundreds of contractors sites. Imagine what this could lead too?
Micah, Google, yahoo, and bing have links you can have their pages that have your duplicate content removed (de-indexed) from the search engines. That’s the route I would take if it continues to be a problem! Then it wont hurt your search results! Easy Fix!
Actually it would increase traffic to both. I know it’s helped me. If it helps his site and mine I would say that’s a success. You really don’t think Ron is going to intentionally hurt everybody’s SEO at the expense of his own do you??
