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Ive found a number of duplicate sites that have copied all of my HTML, CSS, JS changed the logo of the company, placed the files on their own domain and are advertising them selves as a company doing the same work as us (eg. all the their images are ours, all the text is ours).

Ive seen this multiple times over the years (including from a big agency who's clients included XBOX). I dont have the time to send take down requests, but what i am very concerned about is duplicate content penalties for my site.

Does google take into account which site published the content first, eg. if its my original content thats been stolen could i get penalised if it shows up elsewhere on the web ?

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    Those re-publishers are called "content scrapers". There is a long history of them causing SEO problems. Jul 20, 2017 at 14:56
  • @StephenOstermiller will they cause SEO probelms for themselves or do they also cause problems for the person they scraped from ? Also if its not so much straight forward content scraping (eg. taking an RSS feed an automaticly republishing it as a new blog post) but they have copied and pasted the entire source code of a site ? Does that pose the same risk ?
    – sam
    Jul 20, 2017 at 15:13
  • Usually for you. Combat these bastards. They are thieves! One reason why they do this is because, 1 they can and, 2 they can get away with it. Too many people are letting these thieves off the hook. Including Google which has a poor history of combating this problem.
    – closetnoc
    Jul 20, 2017 at 15:34
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    "copied and pasted the entire source code of a site" - this could be more than a content scraper. They could be effectively cloning your site (proxying requests) - as soon as you update your site, the cloned site is automatically updated. The result is the same (if not a bit more immediate) - they are stealing your content - and the same SEO problems apply. The site scraping/cloning the content naturally faces an uphill battle in terms of SEO, but they can only do harm to you.
    – DocRoot
    Jul 20, 2017 at 17:27

3 Answers 3

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Ive found a number of duplicate sites that have copied all of my HTML, CSS, JS changed the logo of the company, placed the files on their own domain and are advertising them selves as a company doing the same work as us (eg. all the their images are ours, all the text is ours)....Does google take into account which site published the content first, eg. if its my original content thats been stolen could i get penalised if it shows up elsewhere on the web ?

When I searched google for certain websites, I've also seen duplicate websites indexed in google. Even though the layout has changed, the exact same paragraphs in the same order are there on the site. I just wished people at google will make bots that detect duplicate content better. Heck google should work on image recognition rather than google home 2.0... end rant.

Sad news is there will be at least someone (or even something a.k.a. robots) who will try to steal your content and publish it. The internet wayback machine is best at this.

What you need to do is literally tailor your website to focus on the user, not robots. For example, when the website first loads, set a cookie then issue a redirect to the main content and only show the main content with all the images properly loaded if the cookie is set. If the cookie is not set, then display an error page. That way, the only thing robots can copy from your site are error pages then the amount of duplicate content you have compared to the rest of the sites is tiny if anything.

Another option which may be of limited success is to redirect computers having certain IP addresses to the error page automatically. I say its limited because some IP addresses are shared between multiple users, but if the same IP address is trying to do terrible things to your server all the time, then redirecting requests from that IP address to error pages (or better yet, blocking the IP) will reduce the chance of content copying and will result in a faster server.

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Even if Google claims that they are able to understand which is the original source of content I would try to reach first the website owner and ask for complete content removal or partial content removal with an attribution link if you prefer.

If they refuse or you don't receive an answer you can fill a DMCA complain. You can find more info here Google Legal Removal Requests.

In addition, I suggest that, when you publish your content on the website, you also share the article on social profiles (FB, Google+, etc.) linked to your website, to help Google duplicate content algorithm match.

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To protect your Content, Use DMCA Tool http://www.dmca.com/protection.aspx

Generally, Google gives high priority to the first index content. After this, It will consider Authority of domains (If an high authority domain copies content from you, They will get Benefited).

For Google Content Policy Visit https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/csp/

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  • What does Content-Policy-Security have to do with the question?
    – Oskar Skog
    Jul 21, 2017 at 20:29
  • Is that the lame ass DMCA protection badge site?
    – Oskar Skog
    Jul 24, 2017 at 11:18

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