What reason would scrapers, and syndication sites outrank all of our content?
-
Typing in any of our titles for content, scrapers and content syndication sites all outrank us by quite a bit. What is the main reason for this usually? I started noticing this happening quite a bit this year, and think maybe it has to do with panda. Has anyone figured out the reasoning?
-
What is the main reason for this usually?
I don't think that there is really a main reason for this.... a couple things play in concert..
As with many sites that produce great content my bet is that... Lots of people have grabbed your stuff and are using it. They are using your titles and your brand and your words and your images to enrich a site that is monetized with ads or affiliate programs. Some of these people are really smart about optimization. Some of them have created sites that have become moderately powerful.
Perhaps this has not been theft. Perhaps you gave your content away and now you are paying the price for creating duplicate content that is being used against you by smart people.
And, google says that they are "good at recognizing relevant content to return to the searcher"... but they have not decided to put the resources into returning the original version - even after we tell them which version it is with rel=author as they requested. They have simply not decided to put the resources into this- even though I am sure that some of them would like it to work that way.
There you have it.
-
A few possibilities. We just went through this:
- If your site recently got hacked and delivered malware, Google may temporarily remove your site or push it down in the rankings. Assuming you fixed it, you should recover fairly soon.
- Do you rank #1 for your own brand name? If not, you may be under a Penguin or Panda penalty. Did you get a warning message from Google regarding unnatural links?
- Is the content on your site unique? (aside from the scrapers) If it's not, that can cause what you're seeing.
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
-
Is having a site map page necessary?
Hello all! So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Myles920 -
Above the Fold Content - Use of large images
Hi All, Our designers have come to the SEO team to ask if have a large image across the top of the page taking up a large majority of the above the fold real estate will impact our SEO. Our initial thoughts are no as long as we have an optimised H1 visibal to the user landing there which informs them what the page is about. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Web Design | | J_Sinclair1 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
Duplicate content
Please help me to solve a problem with duplicate content errors.
Web Design | | NadiaFL
I received report today that 53 pages (all my pages) are market as duplicate
content. Yes, they are all about Oasis of the Seas but about different aspects
of it. Question is: how I can handle this error in report? Thank you!0 -
How will it affect my site if i link to a site with adult content?
We are currently working on creating 2 sites for a company, one with no adult content, one with adult content. Will it affect the non adult content site if i link to the other one in terms of Google and being blocked by some internet providers.
Web Design | | MattWheatcroft0 -
Considering site navigation options
I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement. I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks. (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers). I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion. This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories. What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system. I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with. Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong? Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?
Web Design | | EugeneF0 -
Does changing nameservers and a new site design affect SEO dramatically
We are about to change nameservers and upload a new website design design, completely rebuilt website to that new hosting, will this effect our seo efforts previously and have an effect on our SEO rankings?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Duplicate content.
Hi there....we're dealing with a duplicate content mess. We're a franchisor(www.kitchensolvers.com), and each of our franchises have their own landing page. The trouble is, the way the landing pages are set up, it's causing all the links available on the national level of the website to be re-indexed each time for every franchise! We don't have an in-house developer and was wondering if anyone else has had similar issues and point me in the right direction.
Web Design | | tafkat0