Scraped Content on Foreign Language Site. Big deal or not?

[MKGraphiques]

Hi All,

I've been lurking and learning from this awesome Q&A forum, and I finally have a question. I am working on SEO for an entertainment site that tends to get scraped from time to time. Often, the scraped content is then translated into a foreign language, and posted along with whatever pictures were in the article. Sometimes a backlink to our site is given, sometimes not.

Is scraped content that is translated to a foreign language still considered duplicate content? Should I just let it go, provided a backlink is given?

Thanks!
Jamie

[94501]

Great question. I try to look at it like "is it worth my time?" The fact that it's translated and you sometimes get a link, really kicks it down the priority list for me. You could spend some time going after it, but to what end? If your new pages are generally crawled/indexed quickly, you probably got first authorship already. If you haven't already, you might want to look into how fast your new content gets indexed. If it is a duplicate content issue, it's really their duplicate content issue, depending on the translation factor. I can't see spending any time on it.

Best... Mike

[JaneCopland]

As Mike has said, the fact that you are often linked to, and the content is translated, would put this far down my priority list as far as SEO goes, in that it's not going to hurt you (unless the site are extremely poor quality and linking to you a high number of times, which doesn't sound like the case here).

I take it they're just lifting the content, not scraping the HTML, given that the content is translated. If they were taking the HTML, you can place the canonical tag in the source code and make it quite likely that they'll publish their version with a canonical tag, pointing to your site.

From a legal point of view, you probably have good claim to go after this behaviour, which is up to you. This should not hurt your SEO, however.