Someone copied my content and it's ranking higher than mine!

[marineinsight]

This post is deleted!

[jonmifsud]

Unfortunately this tends to happen at times. Google is not able to detect who was the original Author of the work; if the website who copied your article has better domain ranking it will most likely overtake yours (possibly kill it from the serps)

This is due to the fact that it will conceive your website as being low quality (especially if its new) whilst the other is more authoritive.

What could you do to improve this?

First of all when you post new articles make sure you use social media, putting up a tweet or G+ post will help, as Google will find your page before. Secondly work on obtaining links towards your content, yes if you have other pages link to you as being the primary source of this content should help you increase trust. Finally you could email the website where your article was copied; and ask them to take it down or provide a link back to your website.

[marineinsight]

Thanks a lot Jonathan for the quick reply. However,

• we rank higher than that website ( Both in terms of page rank, popularity, and traffic)

• we are in the top 5 websites in our niche and have the largest social media following including google plus, facebook, and twitter. (We share every post, extensively)

• The person who has copied the content has done that in the past as well, and we have tried contacting the webmaster but they never reply and still keep doing the same thing. He just shamelessly copied and pasted without giving us any credits.

Does this mean there are big loopholes in google's algorithm?

[jonmifsud]

Strange, I'm quite positive that one can find loopholes, It's possible that having seen people copying content from other websites, they try to identify who published the article first.

Usually social indicators like tweets or G+ would help Google identify that you have posted a new article and get it crawled ASAP. If you had to search for your new url in Google does this come up?

[marineinsight]

Surprisingly, none of the social media links are ranking!

Is there a possibility that search engines have not been informed about the new post? Probably due to some glitch on our side? If yes, where should we begin to look for the same?

Thanks a lot in advance.

P.S - Think I am going to send a strong mail to the webmaster again. Does services like this - http://www.dmca.com/ helps?

[MoosaHemani]

I believe this usually happens when the website have more Domain Authority then you have plus more social shares on that particular post then you have and more importantly when they have more links pointing to that post then you have!
In order to prevent this thing, I would advise you to do the following things..

-          Plan a Social Sharing strategy before you hit the publish button

-          Plan an Outreaching strategy before the post go live so that you can earn some quick links.

-          Build your domain authority on Regular basis

-          Use Author tag!

This might help you stay on the safer side!

[jonmifsud]

It could be related to how quickly your social links are out.

What could possibly help is making sure you embed some internal links within your articles; if it is copy & paste, or a script there's a good chance that the links might get copied in too. Giving you a link back.

G+ Authorship as mentioned by Moosa could also help verify that you're the author of the content.

[RepLoc_Tim]

You should be able to prevent this moving forward by using Publisher and Authorship on your site and the steps to follow instantly that Moosa mentioned, but here is an extra thought to consider beyond this...

If you have already been doing these things, then you should look at your "Author" power.  If your site authorship is tied to a dead Google+ profile (or multiple ones) with no authority, that isn't active, isn't networked, isn't linked to other social properties around the web where you also have clout, then your Authorship may not have as much strength as theirs.  We are starting to see evidence of this with people/clients who setup a Google+ account just for the sake of connecting the loop with Authorship on their site, but have no intention of staying active on that profile.

[PaddyDisplays]

If you get no answer from the webmaster, try contacting the host as hes probably breaking their T&Cs by stealing content and if they contact him about it then the webmaster might take it more seriously.

[marineinsight]

@Tim I think what you stated can be one of the reasons. We have good following on our company page but not on personal profile. Probably this can be one of the reasons. We will work on implementing this asap.

@Paddy That's a great idea. We found out that the other person is hosted with godaddy. I hope they would help us to get this thing sorted out.

@Mossa - thanks a lot for those great tips. Can you please let us know what do you exactly mean by " earn some quick links by Outreaching strategy"?

Thanks a lot all for the great response.

Regards

Raunek k