How to treat 3rd party website that has duplicated our US content in Spanish?

[djaconi]

This post is deleted!

[dianemahan]

Hi djaconi,

I wouldn't advise creating any hrefs that go to a 3rd party site. To me, that is like surrendering your web content and being okay with NOT ranking for that content in Mexico. Depending on the number of potential affiliates you have there, that may be okay.

If you do choose to set the href as Flintel, then you'll essentially be helping with their pagerank. The link love doesn't appear mutual, though. Flintel has a handful of outbound links to your site but does not actually mention "Teletrac" by name on their site (in Chrome, "site:flintel.com "teletrac""). They have your logo paired with their logo in an image but that's it. I don't see any alt text that references Teletrac either.

We're dealing with this same issue where a Russian website has basically created a clone of our US client's site. Even reminding the Russian company that they are infringing on copyright and lowering pagerank of both our sites has not had any effect. Since the affiliate won't rework their content to be unique, it's up to our client to create new, unique content on their own site.

[gazzerman1]

Do you want this client to have full rights to the Spanish speaking Mexican market? If so then you can use hreflang, this will mean any time anyone is searching in Spanish in Mexico Google will show Flintel instead of Teletrac.

If not then I would be very cautious of linking to each other Googlebot would see those as paid links unless they are all marked as nofollow.

hreflang can always be undone and it can happen very quickly, I have made changes and seen dramatic results in 48hrs. Just make sure you set Teletrac as x-default so that all other traffic goes to Teletrac.