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Simply file a DMCA complaint and their results from SERPS will be removed. It will not help you much if you ask them to add a credit link or something else. Moreover, if there are just 2 to 3 scrapper sites then first ask them to remove your content from their sites, mostly wouldn't reply if they are earning much from that scrapped content. If they don't reply then file a DMCA complaint. I think DMCA is the best option, I've seen ever.

There has been a lot of discussion about the different extensions lately, here are two that I have been in on http://moz.com/community/q/i-have-to-change-my-site-s-name-and-domain-is-using-ninja-going-to-be-a-huge-pitfall http://moz.com/community/q/london-and-long-terms-value-of-tlds Personally I would not launch a site with them, it is unclear how search engines are going to handle them. There is too much user training to get them to use them currently as well. Buying them, for the cheap cost and the insurance of having them, sure, why not. But I would not do much with them. Maybe a static site with a contact form for the time being.

Ctrl + Alt + ?

Yeah, if sites that are linking to you have been hit then you may lose rankings. Penguin may have devalued some of your links as well (not the same as penalised, be aware), which would also lose you rankings. Like a previous commenter has said, wait a week or so before panicking. Look at onsite stuff as well, really a site doesn't need that many links if the content and site are well built and follow best practice. (by not many links I mean not many high value ones - you'd need thousands of poor value ones to rank well - but you'd always be looking over your shoulder for a big fat penguin chasing you down!) Also, look at your competition - what's happened to the sites that share your vertical? Has any of them suddenly shot up in the serps? Maybe they've had a penguin penalty lifted and you're the collateral? Sometimes we lose ranking because another site in the same vertical does something better than us - hard to admit I know, but worth bearing in mind. Best of luck with this! Amelia

You can search for blogs/sites with tools like feedly.com and check Domain Authority with opensiteexplorer.org, yes it's a irritating labour intensive manual work.

Let me add that In many cases the title tag will also contain the website's name, as in <title>Awesome Cool Headline | website name<title></li> <li>A good CMS will let you differentiate between headline in title and headline on the page (the H1)</li> <li>If your website is indexed by Google News the shown headline will be the H1, not the title tag</li> </ul></title>

Another thing to consider is the visitor/commercial intent of the specific keywords you're targeting. You can find that even very similar keywords/synonyms can have a different intent or level of customer awareness and even though they may be "talking about the same thing", you may want to create separate pages that match the searchers intent/objectives. Don't stop at the point you determine the keyword volumes and whether the keyword is relevant to your business/services/products, but ask yourself "what is the visitor looking for/trying to do when they search for {query}" And take a good look at the search results returned from each keyword it can tell you a lot about how both google and your completion view the term.

Under the performance tab and  general settings check to see if debug mode is checked. Not that I am expert on this plugin! It is very complex. Best!

How big is the site in question? How many pages are there to de-index? What does Google Webmaster Tools tell you about the old domain? Does it show pages being removed from the index over time? If you do a site:{old domain} query, can you see that the number of results being returned is gradually decreasing? How have you implemented the redirects? Have you submitted a change of address request in Webmaster Tools? On the new website, have you submitted a sitemap fom the old website as well as the new one? What does the backlink profile on the old domain look like? Can you start to get authoritative links to the old site updated? What about any embedded internal links in your content - have they also been updated? More guidance from Google here: Webmasters Tools Help: Move a site with URL changes

Yay. Good to hear!

Thanks for the response and follow up. I will dig deeper as to why the better rankings and incoming traffic recently. Regards,

SEMrush got back to me, and it was a bug. But glad to know that I was checking all the right things. It's good to get confirmation from another SEO that I was doing this correctly. Thanks

Hi there, I've never seen this happen to a client so I'm only speaking from a theoretical point of view. My feeling is that it is possible for a penalty to be passed via a 301 redirect. One core reason is that if it didn't, then it would be a very easy way for low quality websites (who don't care about their brand / company name) to just keep switching websites. I don't think it will happen in all cases, but I certainly think it's possible. If this were to happen to you, my feeling is that you should create a disavow file on the new domain which contains the links to the old domain but go through the 301. This feels a bit messy but I don't see an obvious alternative. The absolute best outcome is to get the links totally removed which can be tricky sometimes. I found this blog post by Dave Naylor which talks a bit more about this subject if you'd like to read more: https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/what-to-do-with-your-disavow-list-when-301ing-an-old-domain.html This Moz Q&A thread also talks about the same situation and has some additional information: http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-dissavow-links-on-a-301-d-website Cheers. Paddy

Hi Thank you for your response. The site is a new site launched last month. It is Chinese however I could not find any contact details. I did send an e-mail via the website but up to now there is no response. Some of the search terms which they have used with our name are appearing on page one of Google which this morning was quite bad for any Google searcher as they were then re-directed to a different product to what they were interested in. Through Google I put in a request to have the urls removed stating the above and that they were using our comany name which is in the process of being trademarked. This afternoon I have now seen that all of the urls are now 404s. Has Google actually read my request or are the urls removed as standard until they look into it. I have had no response from Google on this? Thank you in advance.

Why couldn't I just put a password on the staging site, and let Google sort out the rest? Just playing devil's advocate.

Thanks!