This is the first of a series of Client Q&A that I will be doing.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me below in the comments area and I will include it in future post with a backlink to your site, if it is a question and answer that adds value and should be shared with the community here!
CLIENT SEO QUESTION
Hi Vishal, need your input here
We have a client called ABCD at website ABCD.com.
You have been building backlinks for us.
When you google the following term, which we are using for the name of google map, we have lot of Russian websites:
Search term: really long tail search word (probably a title of the page)
Seems like they are copying the content?? W hat can we do? And will it have negative effect on SEO?
MY ANSWER
These sites have probably just scraped your sites content using a bot. There are many sites that do this and Google is aware.
Don’t worry Google has checks in place to keep them from ranking … and it wont have any impact on your site.
The fact that they are showing up BELOW your site for that long tail keyword title search tells you that Google treats YOUR site as the original content publisher and knows this.
This happens all the time online. Many scrapers and bots are just copying content.
This is why when you publish new content, you should go to search console immediately and tell google about the new content by submitting the URL.
Then wait to see if it gets indexed (should happen in a few minutes or an hour if its a low updating site).
At the same time tweet the new URL you published. Twitter has a direct pipeline into google’s index. By tweeting you put a genuine timestamp on the post also… claiming you published it at such and such time.
So if anyone scrapes and backdates the post (which is easy for them to do with WordPress or any other CMS) – Google can still see the tweet and know who the original publisher was, because you tweeted the original link before Google crawled their site (and saw the published post date / which even if incorrect is spoofed and the algorithm knows this as it not only did not find the content on the site at the said date but it also sees that it got the content from another source via twitter with a genuine timestamp, thereby validating the date of the post from your site.
This may be a bit tricky to understand, but tweeting your new post works in your favour in many ways in addition to your Search Console submission (which is actually the most verified method through which Google gets the published date validity).
Also, you may want to go to pingomatic.com – and submit the url to be pinged by RSS feed readers etc. so that it gets you indexed faster. This is a good thing to do if your indexing rates are slow on your site.
Remember, the aim here is to get indexed FIRST for the new content you put out and not have someone else (who may be monitoring your site for new content) steal your content and post it on their site and get indexed before you for that content – thereby falsely claiming the originality of that content.
If this does happen, and someone else shows up for your “posts title search” in Google then you have no option but to do a DMCA complaint. This can be done through dmca.com and/or Google’s DMCA page.
Have a question? Feel free to ask below and I’ll turn it into a blog post with a backlink to your site if its a good question! 🙂