What would be the best course of action to nullify negative effects of our website's content being duplicated (Negative SEO)

[Hasanovic]

Hello, everyone

About 3 months ago I joined a company that deals in manufacturing of transportation and packaging items. Once I started digging into the website, I noticed that a lot of their content was "plagiarized". I use quotes as it really was not, but they seemed to have been hit with a negative SEO campaign last year where their content was taken and being posted across at least 15 different websites. Literally every page on their website had the same problem - and some content was even company specific (going as far as using the company's very unique name).

In all my years of working in SEO and marketing I have never seen something at the scale of this. Sure, there are always spammy links here and there, but this seems very deliberate.  In fact, some of the duplicate content was posted on legitimate websites that may have been hacked/compromised (some examples include charity websites.

I am wondering if there is anything that I can do besides contacting the webmasters of these websites and nicely asking for a removal of the content?

Or does this duplicate content not hold as much weight anymore as it used to. Especially since our content was posted years before the duplicate content started popping up.

Thanks,

[Chris.Menke]

Hi Hasanovic,

What's your estimate of the strength of the domains that are copying your content?   In other words, are they coming up in search results for relevant queries ahead of you? Are they coming up ahead of you for phrases in quotes?  The point I'm getting at  is --how sure are you that you are seeing a negative impact from this?

I  ask because Google is quite good at knowing what content goes up before other content and there may not be any impact to your site at all.  Google is also quite good at knowing when content on a site is copied from another. If there are 15 sites all using the same copy stolen from you Google will have a hard time ranking those sites above sites with original content--unless those site have substantial domain authority.

If you are sure of the negative impact, then be sure you are requesting indexation of new content when it goes live and work on developing the strength of your pages and your domain.