Somebody took an article from my site and posted it on there own site but gave it credit back to my site is this duplicate content?

[edward-may]

Hey guys,

This question may sound a bit drunk, but someone copied our article and re-posted it on their site the exact article, however the article was credited to our site and the original author of the article had approved the other site could do this.  We created the article first though, Will this still be regarded as duplicate content?

The owner of the other site has told us it wasn't because they credited it.

Any advice would be awesome

Thanks

[Dezzign]

Hi Edward,

Duplicate content is generally only harmful when it's on your own site. I say generally because you wouldn't want to post the exact same or poorly spun article on multiple websites to get links coming in but that's not what's happening here.

I have duplicated entire sites onto new domains and changed only the suburb keyword. I just did an entire swap and replace of one location keyword and the new duplicated site ranked beautifully. It's not a tough niche of course, but in duplicate content on different domains isn't a problem.

In your case I wouldn't worry about it too much at all, as it won't hurt your rankings. If you want to get rid of it though, just sign up for a free DMCA account and they'll get it taken down for you, assuming you own that content or originally paid for it to be created.

[EGOL]

If you have an article on your site and that article is then published verbatim on another site or multiple sites, then there is a good chance that one of the following will happen.

**  If one of the other sites is stronger than your site, the stronger site has a good chance of outranking you in the Google search results.  It does not matter if you published first, the other site, if stronger, still has a good chance of outranking you.  Googlers will tell you "we are usually good at recognizing the original source of the content".  I will be generous and say that they are wildly overestimating their abilities.

**  If your article is published on lots of other sites - even weak sites - it is possible that your site will be filtered from the search results.  You can see what sites are being filtered by going to the last page of the search results for a querry.  There, if any pages are being filtered you will see

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 100 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If your site is the strongest for that query then, if you are lucky, the other sites will simply rank below you for the same query.

It is best not to share your content.  If you want to share it and have a really good chance of it being credited to you, then the site publishing it should add an rel=canonical to the page like this...

That will credit the article to your site and instruct google that this page should not appear in the search results.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Great advice as always!

[edward-may]

Hi EGOL

Thanks for your great advice.  I just received an email from the other site saying they have created a canonical to the site credited our site! Thanks for clearing everything up for me!

Justin

[edward-may]

Thanks Richard, I had an email just now from the site owner saying they have created a rel canonical and credited our site!