Scraped Content must be Reported to Google

Content scraping is something that most webmasters know to avoid, and they live in fear of it themselves in case their own content gets stolen. Web designers in Somerset are always advising webmasters to focus on high-quality, unique content and to ping news networks and promote the content so it gets indexed while it is still fresh.

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Avoiding a Penalty Yourself

Sometimes, webmasters scrape content by accident – for example, if they are publishing blog feed links or social media streams in their sidebar. On a long, informative blog post page this should be a non-issue, but on a page with a simple infographic, the scraped content could hog more page time than the actual content. Fortunately, if the majority of your site’s content is good, Google will not punish an entire website for one bad page.

What to Do if You Get Scraped

Unfortunately, sometimes Google gets it wrong. Google was, until recently, inviting webmasters to report occasions when a copycat site ranks more highly than the original, so that the rankings could be re-assessed, although that does not always mean that they would do anything about it. In fact, they recently closed the form.

Google’s new unspoken stance means that Web designers will need to be more mindful of their clients’ sites being ripped off. Even high-quality websites can sometimes fall victim to scrapers, and while the search giant will doubtless be working behind the scenes to find new ways of detecting stolen content, it’s clear that the current system is far from perfect. Google is either indexing the scraping sites before the legitimate sites or putting ‘trust’ in the wrong websites in general.

Beating content scrapers is a complex algorithmic challenge, especially if the scrapers don’t steal entire sites in one go. Duplicating articles almost instantly, from a range of sources, while also publishing original content, seems to be enough to beat the system.  If you need help with content writing, weather its on or off page you could contact a Belfast SEO company at sites like https://www.rycomarketing.co.uk/digital-marketing-belfast-northern-ireland/seo-belfast/ Perhaps the answer lies in bot-blocking to stop the scrapers even seeing your site or in getting your content syndicated more aggressively. Or perhaps the answer is to get more traffic from social media or RSS feeds instead of relying so heavily on organic search. Either way, it is a fight that will continue for a long time to come.

 

Admin

Admin works in Technology development and regularly contributes to blogs around the web with advice, tips, and strategies for business marketing and promotion. Even when he’s not in the office Jake is thinking about new marketing tactics and techniques. He just can’t get enough!

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