Getting Duplicated Content Removed
-
So I recently took over an in-house SEO role and began some house cleaning. I found a few places that had copied or duplicated our homepage content. Naturally I reached out to them to ask them to remove or change the content. Today I come to the office and one of the sites I had requested to remove the content, had fired back at me that I was being rude, threatening and I should go f**k myself. As if this wasn't enough this guys was an upper level manager (managing director) and knows the upper management where I work. Now I have people in my company pissed at me, when I thought I was doing the right thing. Am I in the wrong or what? I had simply asked to remove or change the content and that failure to do so could result in legal action. I understand that it could have been misconstrued as a threat (which it wasn't intended to be) but its seems like a pretty immature response from a higher level person. Any thoughts or advice on what to do next?
-
It is a very small world in a lot of business niches. Always assume that your boss knows your competitor.
Also, unless you are the owner of the company you should never make a threat or send a nasty email to anyone. Tell your boss about the problem and let him/her do that dirty work. That's what bosses are for (I am a boss so I can say that with confidence.)
Nevertheless... if this person is getting away with using your homepage content he might also be using your product page content, images and who knows what else.
I would be on the lookout for other infringements and if I found them I would (in this instance) gently inform my boss about duplicate content problems that might arise and losses in your corporate advantage related to infringement.
Be ready to give a very short and very convincing statement about why this is an important issue. You have seen how they behaved in this situation. There could be strong relationships between the companies and your company could be on the advantageous side of them.
Good luck. Be careful.
-
Consider if the duplicate content is really enough to make a fuss over, if it is, go to the people he knows and explain to them what they are doing and how it is hurting your bottom line (try to put it into dollar amounts with data).
Money talks, often companies are willing to cooperate and help each other until they understand the dollar amounts involved.
-
People in power like to throw that power around, both to prove to others that they have it, and to remind themselves that they're so amazing.
Since you're the new guy, and have yet to prove your worth, my best suggestion, both from an SEO perspective as well as a life-lesson and general business perspective would be to let the subject drop for the time being. If it's just content on the home page and not the entire site, given the politics of it all, you're probably better off focusing on other tasks so that you can build your worth to management over time.
Maybe one day you'll be able to revisit the concept of why duplicate content is bad for the company, maybe you won't.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Repurpose/reuse blog content - email address to make available for this
Hi, From Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday, I learned this: "Have right on the blog page the email address to use if they want to repurpose/reuse the content. That way if someone wants to give us a backlink and quote/reference our blog, they have an easy way to get permission." My question is, what do I say with the email address when I list our contact email? Something like 1. Just list the email address 2. "To reuse/repurpose our content, please contact [email protected]." or something else?
Content Development | | BobGW0 -
What makes high quality content?
Content is becoming more and more important in rankings and I was wondering what exactly Google defines a good content. Any ideas?
Content Development | | EJDekkers0 -
Get duplicate content error in seomoz even after fixed canonical
http://www.webworld.no - We have been getting error Page Duplicate Content Errors. But we have fixed the canonical. Actually, we have list of portfolio and detailed page for each portfolio But We get error all portfolio pages are having duplicate content. But, i made canonical tag to direct to root page. Please help me to overcome this. Also, i see duplicae webworld.no & www.webworld.no. is there anything i need to fix in redirection? in server?
Content Development | | Webworld_Norway0 -
How Google judge about duplicate content?
With recent Search engines updates one thing is clear we cannot ignore content. Content marketing definitely going to be most important part of our SEO strategy. I have few doubts about content marketing (circulation of content over web) where I want suggestions of community members. There would be different thoughts so I would like to have as many as responses to know what majority thinks: When we are writing guest posts, does article needs to be unique with each and every blog we are writing or we can safely circulate one good piece of content to 10-15 blogs who are interested in our creative. We have written a good blog post for our own domain. Apart from social sharing should it be posted to other related blogs too or it should be unique to our domain only. Social sharing, mentions, like of blog matters in rankings?Seems yes they do but need to know what majority thinks. Finally what is the safe number to circulate your content over web.
Content Development | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
I want to remove some pages from my site with PR, what should I do with traffic?
I have a section of a site that I want to remove. It has a main page linked from the nav menu, and a half dozen subpages under that. The pages get some traffic and have ranks up to PR3, which is what my site's home page is. I'm no longer want to do these pages as they require tremendous upkeep and I'm not interested in keeping them going. So, I know if I just remove these pages and that's all, I'm going to pay for it somewhere with Google. What else should I do? I do't really have similar pages to direct them too.
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
How quickly should one add content?
I'm building a content site (the model is AdSense revenue) around a certain niche, and I'm currently paying for about 6 articles to be contributed per week. I have the capacity to be paying for a lot more articles, however, so I'm wondering what, if any, factors exist to recommend building the site up slowly as opposed to throwing on e.g. 100 articles over the next week? Those I can think of are: 1. Going slowly leaves room for better keyword optimization etc. 2. Google seems to favor aged domains/content, so 100 good articles now certainly isn't as advantageous as 100 articles 2 years from now. All that being said, I still feel like the benefit in terms of traffic of adding more content now - since I can - might outweigh these considerations. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Content Development | | ZakGottlieb710 -
Help with Duplicate Content Issue for pages...
I have pages with duplicate content, i want to put them on hold while i write unique content as i do not want to get marked down for it. I also want to keep the urls and use them again.
Content Development | | pauledwards
There are about 300 pages affected by duplicate content currently. Am i best doing 302 redirects as it is temporary? to the origional source of the content, or canonical tags no index? The pages are currently indexed and cahced by google, i want to use the url in the future for unique content to get it valued by Google. Any advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,0 -
Building Content on E-Commerce Store
Hey guys, In 2011 it seems more and more important to build great content on your website to help SERP rankings. With an E-Commerce store what is the best way to add content? Would using the blog and adding related blog articles related to the product work and internally linking the anchor text to the specific product page? Obviously it would be more beneficial to rank the specific product page so wouldn't this method take away from those efforts? Or do we bank on being able to channel the visitor from the blog to the product page? Thanks Jason
Content Development | | mediapoint0