Self inflicted duplicate content penalty?

[GrumpyCarl]

Wondering if I could pick the brains of fellow mozer's. Been working with a client for about 3 months now to get their site up in the engine. In the three months the DA has gone from about 11 to 34 and PA is 40 (up from about 15) so that's all good. However, we seem not to be moving up the ranking much. The average DA of competitors in the niche in the top ten is 25. We have 9.2 times the average no of backlinks too.

During a call to the client today they told me that they noticed a major drop in their rankings a few months back. Didn't say this when we started the project.

I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!!

Clearly something is not right here. Looking into this, I seems that someone has use their content, word for word, as the descriptions on thousands of blogs, social sites.

I am thinking that this, tied in with the slow movement in the listings, has caused a duplicate content penalty in the search engines.  The client haven't copied anyone's content as it is very specific for their site but it seems all over the web.

I have advised them to change their site content asap and hope we get a Panda refresh in to view the new unique content. Once the penalty is off i expect the site to shoot up the rankings.

From an seo company point of view, should I have seen this before? Maybe. If they had said they suffered a major drop in rankings a few months back - when they dropped their seo agency, I would have looked into it, but one doesn't naturally assume that a client's copy will be posted all over the web, it is not something I would have searched for without reason to search

Any thoughts on this, either saying yes or no to my theory would be most welcome please.

Thanks

Carl

[PatrickCoombe]

How many pages do you have total?  If it is a small number this is an easy fix.

A lot of the time people trust content to be unique and don't check, I myself am guilty of this.

Thanks for reminding me that this can and does happen.

[EGOL]

the client and their previous seo agency were the one putting their own content on tons of websites which makes it even worse

Oh, that is bad.  I believe that rewriting will be a solution.  But, will be expensive.

[GrumpyCarl]

I agree fully with everything you say on this, the difference here I feel is that the client and their previous seo agency were the one putting their own content on tons of websites which makes it even worse. Hopefully a change of content will see the site back to where it belongs

[EGOL]

I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!!

I think you are correct.   This is deadly stuff.

This happens all of the time.  Lots of people come in here to Q&A and say..... :"Wahhhh! My traffic dropped" and we say..  "You got dupe content".. and they argue with us.

If you have a site that is getting lots of traffic there is going to be lots of copies of your content out there.

I was selling backpacks and over 1000 Chinese sites republished my descriptions (they were made in China) and my rankings tanked. Tanked.

I had a great article of interest in the commodity investing niche and the weasels in that space grabbed it and republished it on xx,xxx domains.  Not kidding. That many.  Too many to fight with DMCA filings.  My article, which IMO was best-on-the-web tanked.  All of this with me publishing first, using author and Google+.

A few years ago a well-known news site started grabbing my feed and republishing.  My rankings dropped like a rock.  But they were good guys and quit doing it when I asked and my rankings came back.

This stuff happens all of the time. Scrapers and human weasels are grabbing your content while you are sleeping.  I am surprised if any reasonably popular site does not have tons of grabbed and republished content on the web and Google does a really bad job of attributing - even if you use the tools that they tell you to use.