An Unfair Content related penalty :(

[jarrodb]

Hi Guys,

Google.com.au
website: http://partysuppliesnow.com.au/

We had a massive drop in search queries in WMT around the 11th of september this year, I investigated and it seemed as though there were no updates around this time.

Our site is only receiving branded search now - and after investigating i am led to believe that Google has mistakingly affected our website in the panda algorithm. There are no manual penalties applies on this site as confirmed by WMT.

Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results. This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.

Typing a products full name into Google (tried a handful) our site is not in the top 100 or 200 at times, i think this further clarifies that we are penalised.

We would really appreciate some opinions on this. Any course of actions would be great. We don't particularly want to invest in writing content again.

From our point of view it looks like Google is stopping our site from ranking because it's getting mixed up with who the originator for our content is.

Thanks and really appreciate it.

[RohitPalit]

Hi Jarrod,

The first thing I noticed, a lot of pages in your site don't contain a rel=canonical tag. For example, this one: http://www.partysuppliesnow.com.au/view-products/96/LED-Furniture

We know that Google is not particularly good at identifying the original source of a content. So, you can report the sites that scraped your content to Google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en). That'll let Google know about the issue and hopefully lift the penalty off your site and penalize the other site.

Another issue could be the Authorship setup on product pages. It's considered as Authorship abuse. Generally, you don't want to link a Google+ profile with a site's homepage and other generic pages.

I've had some experience with Panda. I can say no-indexing is very effective in fighting Panda. If you know about a significant number of low-quality pages in your site, that you wouldn't prefer to open as a searcher, you should add a meta no-index tag in the section of those pages. It takes some time to get out of the Panda box.

Regards,
Rohit

[zoicaremus]

Hi Jarrod,

You are in a very complicated situation. I hope you can find a solution.

This video posted by Matt Cutts a wile ago might help you with a few additional tips:

How can I make sure that Google knows my content is original?

- DMCA request: http://www.google.com/dmca.html

- Google News source attribution metatags: link here

- Or even spam report like Matt Cutts suggests.

[Milian]

In addition going forward you should always ensure you have two types of content. A set of content you use on your site, and another set of content that you supply to affiliate sites and any other sites you supply products too.

I know this isn't much help now, but its something you should do in future to prevent such issues.

[EGOL]

Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results.

I saw the same thing.  There is your problem.

This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.

Although google says that they are "pretty good" at attributing content to the creator the truth is that the suck at it.

Lots of people have this problem.  Guard your content so it doesn't get out to affiliates and shopping engines.  This means strongly enforced rules for your affiliates and blocking crawlers from your site - but allowing google in.

[jarrodb]

Hi guys,

Thank you all, for your kind advices. We have planned to re-write our content (product descriptions). Now, we will write 2 types of descriptions. 1 for our site and 1 for our affiliates (who promote our products). We hope Google won't confuse it this time.

As we are going to write the content again. I am still afraid, it could be stolen again. So, is there a way that we could tell Google that we are the originator of this new content???

If there isn't any solution, I think, we would lose our ranking again. Right??? I don't wanna lose our efforts again. So, can you suggest any concrete solution???

thanks again guys
Jarrod

[Milian]

Hey Jarrod,

I'm afraid there isn't anything you can actually do to tell Google you are the original author of your content, other than the tips Remus mentioned.

However, there is a service that you can use to help you identify sites that are duplicating your content.  It's called Copysentry and it automatically scans the web to check for content duplication. You could use this, in conjunction with DMCA take down requests (as mentioned in Remus's post) to help to defend against this in future.