Plagiarism Hurts Your SEO
One of our clients RealAs.com , was featured on the National Nine News last Friday night. I recorded what happened to the traffic in realtime and it was most enlightening. One of the interesting things about the RealAs site is that it has a lot of duplicate content. That is, content duplicated externally not internally. The site gives predictions for what a property will sell for which are usually way more accurate than the advertised price. Needless to say, its copping a lot of flack from real estate agents. By its very nature though it has a lot of duplication as it has the same properties as the real estate sites.
For it’s part, RealAs are writing a lot of great content on their blog and of course they offer a unique perspective on the duplicate property in the way of a more accurate price.We are working with them so Google starts to see them as more of an authority on every real estate address published.
Content Thieves Abound!
So this sort of duplication is not affecting RealAs. The type of external duplication that CAN affect your rankings though is when someone just blatantly rips off your stuff. This happens to me every week. As soon as I publish, the bots come in to feast on the fresh content like binary seagulls on a hot chip.
Fortunately for me Google finds my content first and I get ranked above these thieves. Not everyone is that lucky though. One client recently got smashed because of content thieves.
We’d successfully got this Brisbane based client on the front page for a pest control related phrase over the last few months. When we started with them they had been at below 200. We got them as high as 8 and then overnight they dropped to no. 90. When this happens we have a series of processes kick in to identify what the cause of the drop was. Within minutes of detecting the drop we were able to isolate the cause to plagiarism. Another .com.au site had basically stolen their content.
Become A Dibber Dobber
A lot of SEOs won’t report sites to Google that are blatantly breaking their terms of service because of the people in glass houses syndrome. I have no such qualms. If someone is ranking above our client and are breaking Google’s rules, we’re dobbing. In the case of blatant plagiarism you better believe I’m making a copyright complaint to Google. Once this complaint was made, as you can see from the above graph, it took about 3 weeks for Google to respond and our clients rankings to return.
Free SEO Webinar
As our first webinar for 2015 we’ll take you through not only how to detect that you are being ripped off but how to fix it. We have a limit of how many we can host on the webinar so email me jim AT stewartmedia.com.au , or check back here for the link which will be posted below.
Here’s the link to next week’s Webinar
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1487812219529780738
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
