International Re-sellers Scrapping My Site Should I be Worried?

[ChadC]

We are a USA based company and we only sell direct to the US and Canada. However, we have partnered with other companies that are now distributing our products in other places like Australia and Mexico for example. These partners have scrapped our site and have used large chunks of our content to create a website for themselves on their intentional domains (ex.. .au and .mx). How concerned should I be about this? Should I reach out to them and require that they use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or request the to stop?  I have never had to deal with international SEO issues before, so any advice and direction would be appreciated!

[Carson-Ward]

It's highly unlikely that someone using your content would outrank you for your own content in English in the US. It usually works the other way around - others are commonly filtered out in favor of the original publisher.

You could, in theory, use hreflang tags. This isn't really the intended use, so I'm not sure what the results would be. In order for it to work, you'd both need to reference all the other versions of the page from every pageeither in a sitemap (better idea) or in the . E.g. you point to them as en-cn and they point to your page with en-us and en-ca. Unless you have some extraordinarily savvy partners, this is probably going to be a mess.

Your partners can help avoid the mess above if they go into Webmaster Tools under "Search Traffic >> International Targeting" and choose a location they want to target. All of this is likely unnecessary if they have (for example) a .cn domain and you have a .com domain. Google will probably figure out the most relevant page to show on its own. That's what you're looking for, if I understand correctly.

If you have US/CA partners, your options are more limited, and there's less room to mutually benefit. You can request they canonical back, but that completely eliminates their ranking ability. You could request a link, but even that request might not go over well. (I wouldn't do it) Amazon often outranks the original product sellers - and that's just the price you pay sometimes when you sell through others.