Duplicate Content: The Other Side of SEO

If you are at least a bit aware of SEO, you know that Google penalizes the site's position in search results when it determines that content has been taken from other sites. The higher positions in search engines your site has, the bigger are the odds that the content from your site will be stolen. The reason is simple. High position ranking in search engines increases your site’s visibility on the web. From one side, this is good because your site draws more direct traffic. However, the direct traffic is not always beneficial, for example, when your site is visited by “enemies”, Internet frauds, willing to steal your great ideas.

Why do people steal content?

The most common reason for fraud of such a kind is somebody else’s eagerness to promote their own websites at the cost of somebody else’s hard work. They select your site among other sites in top ten Google results, visit your site, see that it contains interesting and quality content, and want to have the same. They simply duplicate the content from your site and place it on their own website without any changes. The worst variant is when they steal not only the content, but also the layout and design, and also try to duplicate the logo of your company so that it visually looks and sounds the same. Why do something on your own, if everything is already done and is freely available in cyberspace! This is the philosophy of frauds. However, such actions do not bring anything good either to the stealer or to the owner of the original source of content…

The consequences of content duplication: for those who steal and for those from whom it is stolen

The first sign that your content has been stolen is sudden slippage of your positions in Google search results. Since Google doesn't want multiple copies of the same content cluttering their results pages, the system devalues all but one of the copies of the content based on the age of the page. However, even if your domain name is pretty old, you site may be devaluated as well, for example, if the content was stolen and placed on a more trusted web site domain. In this case Google may think that it is you who have stolen the content rather than it has been stolen from you. Also, keep track of the so called “clone” sites appearing on the web – sites with the same design and idea and stolen content. If there are many sites containing your content, the result might be pretty devastating for both, the original and duplicated resources.

How to check for duplicate content

A web master should regularly take some time and check the site for duplicate content. Lucky for us, we have a good resource for monitoring such things. If you suspect that someone has stolen content from your web resource, go to www.copyscape.com, enter the URL of the page you want to check, and get a list of pages in the Google index that contain text also present on your site. For more detail you can subscribe to their Copysentry service.

What to do if you spotted your content on another web resource?

If you have some concerns that someone has duplicated your content, write to the website owner who has published your content requesting they remove the duplicated text. To add more weight to your request, mention that you will report the matter to Google under their DMCA guidelines. If no measures are taken from their side, report the duplicate content issue to Google under the DMCA guidelines they provide at http://www.google.com/dmca.html. If nothing else helps, change your text so that it bears no similarity with the duplicated copy or write a better copy. In case with web design and brand fraud, the only way out, if nothing else helps, is complete redesign of your site and filling it with fresh content.