Getting Duplicated Content Removed
-
So I recently took over an in-house SEO role and began some house cleaning. I found a few places that had copied or duplicated our homepage content. Naturally I reached out to them to ask them to remove or change the content. Today I come to the office and one of the sites I had requested to remove the content, had fired back at me that I was being rude, threatening and I should go f**k myself. As if this wasn't enough this guys was an upper level manager (managing director) and knows the upper management where I work. Now I have people in my company pissed at me, when I thought I was doing the right thing. Am I in the wrong or what? I had simply asked to remove or change the content and that failure to do so could result in legal action. I understand that it could have been misconstrued as a threat (which it wasn't intended to be) but its seems like a pretty immature response from a higher level person. Any thoughts or advice on what to do next?
-
It is a very small world in a lot of business niches. Always assume that your boss knows your competitor.
Also, unless you are the owner of the company you should never make a threat or send a nasty email to anyone. Tell your boss about the problem and let him/her do that dirty work. That's what bosses are for (I am a boss so I can say that with confidence.)
Nevertheless... if this person is getting away with using your homepage content he might also be using your product page content, images and who knows what else.
I would be on the lookout for other infringements and if I found them I would (in this instance) gently inform my boss about duplicate content problems that might arise and losses in your corporate advantage related to infringement.
Be ready to give a very short and very convincing statement about why this is an important issue. You have seen how they behaved in this situation. There could be strong relationships between the companies and your company could be on the advantageous side of them.
Good luck. Be careful.
-
Consider if the duplicate content is really enough to make a fuss over, if it is, go to the people he knows and explain to them what they are doing and how it is hurting your bottom line (try to put it into dollar amounts with data).
Money talks, often companies are willing to cooperate and help each other until they understand the dollar amounts involved.
-
People in power like to throw that power around, both to prove to others that they have it, and to remind themselves that they're so amazing.
Since you're the new guy, and have yet to prove your worth, my best suggestion, both from an SEO perspective as well as a life-lesson and general business perspective would be to let the subject drop for the time being. If it's just content on the home page and not the entire site, given the politics of it all, you're probably better off focusing on other tasks so that you can build your worth to management over time.
Maybe one day you'll be able to revisit the concept of why duplicate content is bad for the company, maybe you won't.
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
-
Can We Publish Duplicate Content on Multi Regional Website / Blogs?
Today, I was reading Google's official article on Multi Regional website and use of duplicate content. Right now, We are working on 4 different blogs for following regions. And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs. USA: http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/ UK: http://www.bannerbuzz.co.uk/blog/ AUS: http://www.bannerbuzz.com.au/blog/ CA: http://www.bannerbuzz.ca/blog/ Let me give you very clear ideas on it. Recently, We have published one article on USA website. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/choosing-the-right-banner-for-your-advertisement/ And, We want to publish this article / blog on UK, AUS & CA blog without making any changes. I have read following paragraph on Google's official guidelines and It's inspire me to make it happen. Which is best solution for it? Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Content Development | | CommercePundit0 -
Tools to created embedded content...
Wondering if anyone has done this before,, this so, would they mind sharing the best approach please. To cut a long story short, one of our seo client is a free UK internet safety resource, backed by (but independent from the UK Govt), the site is heavily talked about by sites such as BBC, Guardian and many more newspapers and as a result the domain authority is creeping up to 90 - Oh to be given the chance to monetise a site with DA 90!!! As you can imagine, with the quality of the links the site picks up, the ranking of content on the site can be fairly easy, but the one problem we are facing is that of sites 'borrowing' our content. These sites tend not to be small bedroom bloggers, but rather all kinds of sites. We have seen our content on UK University websites, Police websites and many more whom should know better. Obviously this is hurting the 'borrower' more than us with regard to duplicate content but it would still be good to get some credit for our work without having to keep hunting the sites down and emailing back and forth. We don't need the credit for backlink purposes but would be nice to have people know we read it incase they want to read more. A solution I have pondered is to create embed options, as per youtube et al. Instead of sites having to copy our content to list it, they can still include our content on their site and avoid any duplicate content issues. As I believe the embedded content will be called from our site (I think that's how a youtube video works) our site would also get the read stats on the content regardless of where is it located. We are hoping that this could become a great content distribution tool, we don't need people to come to our site as the site is non profit, has no advertising but we need to justify the resources we get by showing how many people are reading what we publish. We are never going to be able to stop sites using our content so, like the music industry and itunes, if we can find a legal way to do it then we can all benefit. My main question, yes, I do actually have one!!!, is two fold. Is it possible to create embed for whole articles and am i right in my thinking that if our content is on Jeff's Blog and loaded as an embed then the hit on the content is still reflected in our stats as the content is being pulled from our url? Sorry for the excessively long way of explaining this, any feedback is welcomed, even 'don't do it, it's stupid idea'!!
Content Development | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
SEO for a News based site : Outdated content
How do we maintain the SEO of a 5 year old News content based site? How should we deal with 3-4 year old content, which are outdated or not searched? Some of them are still useful as archiving/history of a topic..but not searched.... ?? Should we no-index them? or should we keep it like that?
Content Development | | Wpfreesetup0 -
Content Curation & Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a client that wants to do content curation but it has been my understanding that adding external content that is already live on another website to your website, you get penalized for duplicate content. I have read that you can create an excerpt and then Google won't penalizes you for duplicate content. Can anyone shed more light on this topic. Thanks
Content Development | | M_80 -
Best way to get my Blog traffic
I've recently began blogging on my site. The content is all unique and useful and written properly without keyword stuffing... My question is, how do i go about getting people to see the blog (getting traffic to it) so that it can get linked to. I've created content that i believe people will naturally link to, the only problem is they're not finding my blog. Any advice on how to get my blog out into the world?! thanks
Content Development | | Prime850 -
How do I get the correct picture to show up in the SERPs?
When I search for "Popular Baby Names" using Google UK, I get the image below that is clearly displaying the wrong picture. I believe they are coming from a module on the page in the left rail. I know I can use Robots.txt to have Google not show the image at all, but I don't want to impact my click through. What is the best way to have the search engine either not display an image that is not part of the resulting article or better yet, pick the right image. |
Content Development | | network_operations| Popular baby names in the UK14 Feb 2012 ... We list the most popular names for babies born in the UK in recent years, taken from official national statistics.www.babycentre.co.uk/pregnancy/naming/popularbabynames |
0 -
Displaying archive content articles in a writers bio page
My site has writers, and each has their own profile page (accessible when you click their name inside an article). We set up the code in a way that the bios, in addition to the actual writer photo/bio, would dynamically generate links to each article he/she produces. Figured that someone reading something by Bob Smith, might want to read other stuff by him. Which was fine, initially. Fast forward, and some of these writers have 3,4, even 15 pages of archives, as the archive system paginates every 10 articles (so www.example.com/bob-smith/archive-page3, etc) My thinking is that this is a bad thing. The articles are likely already found elsewhere in the site (under the content landing page it was written for, for example) and I visualize spiders getting sucked into these archive black holes, never to return. I also assume that it is just more internal mass linking (yech) and probably doesnt help the overall TOS/bounce/exit, etc. Thoughts?
Content Development | | EricPacifico0 -
My WebSite has two sections with overlapping, or redundant articles on the same topics. Google is only listing one or the other article in Search Results. What should I do to have both pages (similiar but unique content ) to be listed?
My Web Site has two sections with overlapping, or redundant articles on the same topics. Google is only listing one or the other article in Search Results. What should I do to have both pages (similar but unique content ) to be listed? Example: http://www.womenshealthcaretopics.com/pregnancy_week_12.htm http://www.womenshealthcaretopics.com/pregnancy_12_weeks.html
Content Development | | docjamesmd0