I would say that one of the most terrible things to happen online is that someone has completely ripped off your content and they are out ranking you. This happens all the time and it’s basically fraud and a breach of intellectual property.
That is, some competitor comes alone, notices you ranking well on the search engines, sees your website and they steal your content. They in turn start to rank and in some cases will jump above you.
They are too lazy to write their own web copy and feel that they have the right to go ahead and blatantly plagiarize from your website. Seeing this happen and watching them leap over you on Google is a killer and can have a serious impact on your business if this is not handled and mitigated early.
Businesses and companies who have had this happen to them have companies to the powers that be, that is Google and there is a solution at hand. Basically, because this is such a common practice Google has now introduced a Scraper Report tool.
This new Google Scraper Report form will not offer an immediate fix and solve all your worries as soon as you hit the submit button, but what this does is show that there is a rampant issue with content duplication and this is having a serious affect online.
Potentially, this will facilitate Google’s spam team to take action against these types of spammers and fraudsters. Basically these guys are spammers, and may have their website manually audited. This is a great step forward and show just how serious the search engine companies are taking this matter.
There is a downside to this and that is that people may report scrappers as an act of malicious behavior when in fact these are credible websites that have their own content and their own IP. I would say the good out weighs the bad as this problem does seem to be getting way out of control.
A rule of thumb here is that all content on your website should have been written by you for your customers. It has to be unique and original. Spend a bit of time on this and you will be rewarded. Taking the easier path and copying web content will be eventually found out and you are the only person that will suffer. Google has some very sophisticated algorithms that can detect duplicate copy and the culprits will not be able to evade this for too long.
Another issue that many people don’t realise is that when they are uploading descriptions for products that are common among other websites this can be looked upon as duplicate copy. Think about a car part that you may have that another company also sells. You both have the same description for the part on your sites so which one should rank higher. Truth is the website with the most authority and trust. If they are an older site and their product page has been live for a long time, then quite rightly it should be ranking higher than yours. Logic dictates this. If they are fierce competitors and the sight of seeing them above you simply turns your stomach then a way around this is to write a new and better product description. This might seem like and insurmountable task if you are a large eCommerce site with thousands of products but there is really no way around this.
A lot of people will outsource this or give it to an office junior but we suggest trying a few products out and seeing the effect that it has.
In conclusion, some websites just seem to outrank out even thought they have stolen your content. It may be the case they have spammed their way up the rankings and hence the results but as I always say, what rises quickly on Google will fall even faster. The way to combat this is to keep on writing your blogs, web pages and you will be fine. Eventually, these that copy you will drop. It’s just a matter of being patient and letting the powers that be, do their thing.
