Welcome to Alledia - the Joomla SEO Experts

What would you do if I scraped the content of your site and put it on my domain? Are you confident that your site will outrank mine?

• If both sites are identical, why should Google rank your site above mine? Would Google lose any value in their results if I ranked and you didn't?
  
• Would customers notice a difference between your site and mine? Do you have any community, any interaction or any brand value that I can't scrape?
• Would you be able to recover? Are you or your customers regularly adding fresh content and generating new links?
  

How Can You Deal With Sites Offering Similar or Identical Content?

ECommerce Sites

If you're selling someone else's products and using someone else's descriptions, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself. That might be customer reviews, comparison tools, a forum or the addition of unique products, but if you're not offering anything unique, theres no reason for search engines to list you.

Local Businesses

If you a regionally-based business you might not have much content and your products might be identical to those offered elsewhere. Differentiate yourself by tying your website in to local search. List your business on Google Local and Yellow Pages sites. Add your region to your metadata and your address to the footer of your site.

Content Sites / Bloggers

Promoting and branding your blog has been well covered elsewhere, but the issue of people producing similar or identical content is very real for bloggers. Some ideas:

• Only use short feeds in your RSS until your site is well established. Offering full feeds on a new site is asking for people to reproduce your content and possible confuse Google as to which is the original site. Read Aaron Wall's reasoning on this.
  
• Without a community you're vulnerable. People commenting, reacting to and benefiting from your content is 90% of your site's value.
  
• Consider a premium content business model.
• Resist the temptation to start your site by fleshing it out with copied content and RSS feeds. Spend that copy-and-paste time creating unique content instead.

Developers and Designers

Like it or not, if you develop templates, extensions or even books, your products will be on warez sites. Even encoding won't stop that from happening. Whats more, most of your customers know about free download sites and can find them within minutes on Google. So how do developers keep ahead of the warez sites?

• Support
• The community nurtured on the developer's forum
  
• Premium content such as documentation and video tutorials that can't be easily distributed
  

Comments (12)

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written by trichnosis, November 28, 2007

most of the proxy sites are doing that. my site has been hijacked by proxies and it looks nearly 6 months to get back my ranking again.

that was terrible

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written by Steve Burge, November 28, 2007

Hi Trichnosis

Sorry to here that. A couple of questions if I may ...

1) Did you do anything that might have made you vulnerable?
2) Did you do anything special to get your ranking back?

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written by Good Web Practices, November 29, 2007

Great advice, I guess this post came from the discussion we had in the club...

I have a question, what about copyrighting material? In the UK there is the possibility to do so with online content: http://copyrightservice.co.uk/ Or would I be right in thinking that it's a bit of a waste of time anyway as the sort of sites that steal content are going to be near impossible to contact and deal with?

I think your right about the importance of community, that is sure something that can't be copied and pasted! Saying that though, not sure its always 90% of the value!

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written by trichnosis, November 29, 2007

@Steve : 1) Did you do anything that might have made you vulnerable? : I did not contact any of those proxy sites and they did not contact me too.

2) Did you do anything special to get your ranking back? : Yes, I have done . I have tried to find the copy of my web sites in google index. I think "inurl:cgi-bin www.sitename.com" and "inurl:q= www.sitename.com" can be useful to find the copy of your web sites. (And one small note: There were "© www.sitename.com 2005-2007" words at the footer of my web site.) After finding the copies of my web site, I have reported them to google and I have blocked the ip of those web sites from my server. After 6 months , Google has deleted the copies of my web site and rankings were back

regards

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written by Good Web Practices, November 30, 2007

Trichnosis, that's a nice idea blocking their ip addresses!

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written by Good Web Practices, November 30, 2007

Seems like SEOMOZ have discussed the issue of copywriting today: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why...u-that-you

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written by Zorro, December 03, 2007

I agree on using the short feeds. I use just my intro text for the feeds since I know the minute I publish an article, it winds up on some other sites. Actually, this way, you can get some additional backlinks - they might even be useful if the copycat sites are not ALL spammy (which in my case they're not) ...

Kind regards,
Zorro

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written by Good Web Practices, December 03, 2007

Zorro, do you submit your own news feeds to these sort of websites or do they just find you?

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written by Klaus Nitsche, December 03, 2007

I have my feed included in my site as a live bookmark, so I guess over time they just found me

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written by Steve Burge, December 03, 2007

Interestingly enough, this guy has an article about how to utilize other people's full feeds and turn Joomla into a Made-for-Adsense machine:
http://www.openjason.com/2007/11/26/joomla-how-to-publish-100-articles-everyday-in-less-than-2-minutes/

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written by Good Web Practices, December 03, 2007

Wow, interesting article Steve! Pretty filthy tatics completely taking others content, but here he says

"If the (RSS) output is nothing more than a title, or a title with a few introductory words, trash it and move to the next. You want to find the feeds that are rich with content. Don't worry though? they're easy to find."

So this confirms what you guys have been saying about the advantages of short RSS feeds

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written by Zorro, December 03, 2007

There are extensions for Wordpress and Joomla available that automate the whole process of setting up these content-scraping sites. Slam some adsense on, lean back and watch the money roll in ... profit from others' work nicely. But I don't believe this will go on forever.

Kind regards,
Zorro

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