We Just Found Out One Of Our Writers Has Been Plagiarizing - Now What?

[RachelEm]

I just found out one of the writers we employ has been simply copying and pasting content from other websites into our clients' websites. She's been doing this for about six weeks.

We are going to speak with our clients to apologize and let them know that the problem is being rectified, but my question is how to best address this issue from an SEO standpoint? I know that the content needs to be rewritten, but those links are now six weeks old - is it best to remove them altogether and start from scratch, or just rewrite the content under the old link?

Are there any steps that I'm missing to solve this?

[trung.ngo]

Hi Rachel,

My advice is to take a look at your analytics to see if the articles are generating traffic or links to the site. If they are, I would keep the same URL and just rewrite them. If the articles are not contributing traffic or links to the site, there's no harm in just removing them, then rewriting the articles and putting them on another URL.

Hope that helps!

-Trung

[CleverPhD]

Agreed - looks like you caught it fairly soon - so as long as you act fast you should be fine.

[katemorris]

There is no reason I know of to delete the pages. Just rewrite the content and make sure you have a valid sitemap. Things should be just fine.

[RachelEm]

Thanks for the input, I appreciate it!