Have you ever posted a page on your website and had someone else or another company steal your content? If you have, it’s not fun. All that hard work that you put into writing original information is now being stolen and used by someone else as if it’s their own. Chances are if it’s a blog here or a blog there, Google won’t penalize the other entire website if they only duplicated a little content. When indexing pages throughout the internet, Google does it’s best to rank the original page first but they could be showing someone else’s site over yours. Having someone else’s blog show up in search results can hurt rankings, and decrease traffic.
If you’re a webmaster and already know what pages from your site have been duplicated, that’s great. For those of you that may be suspicious, be sure to check your site for duplicate content yourself.
Getting Duplicate Content Removed:
- Contact The Thief: This may be the easiest and most simple way possible. While others don’t always cooperate, reaching out to the thief through a phone call or contact form submission can work. Be sure to tell the person that the content is stolen and that they should take it down immediately to avoid a complaint to the DMCA.
- Google: If you have noticed that the duplicate content is out ranking your original content, you may file a DMCA complaint within Google Search Console. Be aware that Google takedowns are on a page by page basis. So, if there are a lot of pages you want taken down, be ready to spend time doing so.
- Takedown Services: Reaching out to people to remove content may not always work. They may ignore you or webmasters might just not have the time. Luckily, there are third party takedown services that get the job done quick. One of the best ways they do it is by leveraging their legal services to strike fear into the offender.