Our partners are using our website content for their websites. Do such websites hurt us due to duplicate content?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

Many of our partners across the globe are using the same content from our website and hosting on their websites including header tags, text, etc. So I wonder will these websites are hurting our website due to this duplicate content. Do we need to ask our partners to stop using our content? Any suggestions? What if some unofficial partners deny to remove the content? best way to handle?

Thanks

[LindsayE]

Well the general answer is... yes, that can hurt you for sure if you're trying to rank. There's MANY ways duplicate content can hurt you. We had a competitor duplicate our content recently... we sent a well written letter informing them they had 48 hours to take the website down or we would take legal action. They took that website down in about two hours and apologized, stating it was a developer they hired that used our website as a template.

If multiple partners are using the same content and your not currently ranking... your best option is to write fresh unique optimized content. If you're ranking with your current content... then going after every partner duplicating your content might be the better option.