What is the best way to resolve duplicate content issue

[sicseo]

Hi

I have a client whose site content has been scraped and used in numerous other sites. This is detrimental to ranking. One term we wish to rank for is nowhere.

My question is this: what's the quickest way to resolve a duplicate content issue when other sites have stolen your content?

I understand that maybe I should firstly contact these site owners and 'appeal to their better nature'. This will take time and they may not even comply.

I've also considered rewriting our content. Again this takes time.

Has anybody experienced this issue before? If so how did you come to a solution?

Thanks in advance.

[TomRayner]

Hi Alex

I think the best solution here and the one that you can control the most is to rewrite the content and then ensure that your new content is seen as the originator.

Rewriting the content will take time, but obviously ensures that the content is unique, removing the duplicate content issue.

If I were you, I would then use a rel=canonical tag solution, so that every page (and new page) has a canonical tag on it.

Among other things, this will tell Google that your site is the originator of this content.  Any other  versions of it on your site or across the web is being used purely for user experience and therefore should not be ranked over the original.

As you will be publishing the content first, it should be crawled first by the search engines as well.  To ensure that it is, I would also share your pages on social media when they go live, as it helps to index the pages much quicker.

This way, the site scraping your content should (in theory) not be able to rank for the content - or at the very least will be seen by Google as the copier of the content, while you will be seen as the originator, due to being indexed first with the canonical tag.

You can read more on canonicals with this handy Moz guide.

Hope this helps.

[sicseo]

Hi Tom

That's a great help.

I just wanted to ensure there wasn't a simpler solution besides rewriting the content. I guess that is the easiest and will ensure canonical tag solution is implemented too.

Thanks.

[TomRayner]

No worries Alex

I mean, contacting the webmasters would technically be simpler, but the chances that you're going to get a response, never mind a take-down of your content, is going to be pretty slim.  Hence I suggested the rewriting.

It's a pain in the arse and requires you to do more work because of someone's laziness, which if course isn't right.  But hopefully, with the fresh content and the tags in place, you'll be given the full credit.

In addition, if any of the content come in the form of blog posts, or if you'd like to do this site-wide, implementing a rel=author tag and verifying Google authorship would again be a signal to Google that your content is original.  Here are a couple of handy guides to help with the markup:

http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218

http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-implement-the-relauthor-tag-a-step-by-step-guide/