Many pages copying my content. Is Google smart enough to...

[MeanerDomainer]

Many pages are copying my content. Is Google smart enough to recognize that mine is the original?

My site was on first page of google results for my target keyword, but my index page recently disappeared completely from results. When I try to search for a string of text on my index page, my page does not show up, but a number of "site statistics" pages, such as pageinsider dot com, that have copied all of my text, show up. I believe that the copying is a fairly recent development and I suspect that it could be at least a factor to my index page disappearing from results.

Are the developers of the Google algorithm smart enough to keep track of who published content first? Even though it should be simple to do, I fear that they are not smart enough to do it.
They don't appear to be smart enough to recognize that "site statistics" pages are very unlikely to be of interest to the vast majority of web surfers (or maybe they just havent't been able to figure out a way to filter out content that would probably only interest specific webmasters).

What's the verdict? Should I try to get these useless sites to remove my copyrighted content? Or is that a useless never ending battle? Or is the copied content not a concern at all?

---------- Post added at 04:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:41 AM ----------

Along those lines, are backlinks from useless sites that are not copying all of my content but also add no value and often also practice cloaking harmful to my site?
Is it reasonable to assume that if Google considered backlinks from such sites to be a negative, Google would (try to) stop such sites from placing well?

 

[enlytend]

Copying USUALLY won't make your site disappear like that. This sounds like some sort of penalty. What does a site:yoursitename.tld search return? Have pages been dropped from the index or just pushed back?

I'm certain they note the date content was first crawled ... but if a copying site is has more authority and is crawled more often than yours ...

Backlinks could be a problem if they think you're involved in some kind of sneaky link scheme. Again though USUALLY they just devalue the link, but it's impossible to say exactly what's going on without examining the site and the results ...

 

[MeanerDomainer]

OK, site:yoursitename.tld does bring up the index page as the 3rd result (with 1 and 2 being different pages of my site), so I was wrong, the index page has not disappeared, it has just gotten pushed so far back that it migh as well have been disappeared.

Some of my other pages still show up on 1st or 2nd page of result for other related keywords.

I fail, at least on first try, to see any wisom in crediting a newer instance of (copied) content, no matter how much larger, or more frequently visited, fresher, or more frequently spidered the site that did the copying is.

Pageinsider dot com and other similar sites present orders of magnitude more pages to Google than my site and are almost certainly also crawled far more often. Their content is no doubt "fresher" since it's frequently different from what Google thinks it will be.

Do webmasters still try to prevent copied content or is it useless to try?

 

[enlytend]

Are these other copies of your article ranking where your article previously was for that same keyword or are they just coming up before (or instead of) your article when you type in that unique string of text?

If they haven't REPLACED you for that first page ranking, it sounds like you may have been hit with some algo filter or dampener for an entirely different reason.

BTW, what kind of results do you get when you search for a unique string from the TITLE TAG of that page?

A couple of things you could try if you're absolutely certain it's the scraped content:

1) Ask them to remove your content, or at least add meta tags to attribute it back to you as the syndicated source/author. If they ignore you, file a DMCA complaint. If you have an RSS feed, don't include entire articles in your feed.

2) Change YOUR content and see what happens. This is "iffy" as a test because you'll also be affecting the freshness factor of your page along with the content.

3) If nonscraped pages seem to be suffering (i.e. if it's a site-wide issue) noindex the offending page and see if the site bounces back.

 

[Smiler]

Don't you think that Google use some sort of time stamp on indexed pages so that it can determine which website had the original contents first from those websites that added the same contents later on. Therefore, the website where the original article first appeared will be given higher priority over cloned copies.

 

[Kate]

It is likely that the contents is scraped from your site by an automated job.
You could compile a list of offending IP addresses and set up the server to return 'customized' contents to them
I mean, it can be downright nasty :kickass:

 

[enlytend]

It is likely that the contents is scraped from your site by an automated job.
You could compile a list of offending IP addresses and set up the server to return 'customized' contents to them

If you do that, just be careful not to accidently include Googlebot or any of the other search bot IP's in that list !

(because that would be bad ... very, very bad ... )

Don't you think that Google use some sort of time stamp on indexed pages so that it can determine which website had the original contents first from those websites that added the same contents later on.

Google doesn't keep tabs on the entire web real-time. If they crawl site B (scraper) before site A (original) they might assume B was the original, especially if site B or page B has more trust factors and there is no authorship or syndication markup on either page.

 

[dojo]

If people are stealing content, contact them to remove it and then, if they don't comply, report to their host. I have suspended few sites like this

 

[nathan1234]

Google is giving update regularly about the duplicate content. It does not like duplicate content at all. Duplicity is always hated by Google and it tries to remove it completely. If anyone is copying content from anywhere on the internet, it would be counted as duplicity and in some cases the site on which the duplicate content is used is penalized by Google. Duplicate contents are easily caught by Google as it is smart enough to find duplicate and remove it as well.