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I think Egol has covered it.

We recently did a DMCA, and it was really quick. Our case was cut and dried though, we're financial services so have to hold a record of everything we publish for our regulator so it was really easy to prove. I did dob the other company in to iStock photo as well though because they are still showing an image we paid for and it's cropped exactly the same as the way our designer did it so we can only assume the other company did steal it.

I'd call it black hat. You're efforts will always be best spent on building value, trust and authority for your brand or company. Don't waste your time on buying false 'likes' or fake links, it'll come back and bite you on the ass eventually. And, anyway, you want your message to be put in front of people who actually want to hear it and do something about it (e.g. buy from you), not people who are paid to say they like it even if they don't. I imagine they aren't real people anyway - you'll be sending fake messages to fake people who will only share it with other fake people - none of this will increase your sales revenue!

Hi,

I don't think it will affect rankings so long as the text on the page stays the same.

I would A/B test this change though, because you may find fewer people download the pack. Or, if that doesn't matter so much as harvesting contact details then I guess it's not a massive concern.

We have a downloads section on our site, and we have a popup newsletter sign-up form which appears when they click the download button. It's not currently compulsory to sign up for the newsletter, but this is something we are considering. I'd be interested to know how you get on with yours!

Best of luck,

Amelia

Hi Andy,

I just wanted to say, I followed your advice and now every single page I've submitted via webmaster tools in the xml sitemap (for Commercial Trust) has been indexed! Thank you for helping with this, you are a super-star!

Amelia

If your competitors have stolen your content and are profiting from it then do everything you can to get it removed! DMCA, write to the sites, write to the hosts.

Do NOT move the content to an archive URL before doing the DMCA or Google won't know that you originally created it. This happened to us - another mortgage broker stole some content from one of our main sales landing pages, we didn't notice until after redesigning our website, and of course our new urls had a later date stamp than the site that stole our content so our listings started to drop (whole site, not JUST the page that had been copied). We got the listings back within a month of filing the DMCA,  but still, it galls that our content may have persuaded customers to contact the other company! They should have been our customers!

By all means rewrite/refresh the content if its 2 years old, but do it as well as the DMCA.

Good luck with this - I feel your pain,

Amelia

I was going to say pretty much the same thing: most people on google+ are there because of SEO. They are not there to connect with other people (I say this in the broadest possible sense), they are there to promote their business. The idea of sharing other company's posts is a pretty good one, just be careful not to share something by a direct competitor. And stick to your niche as much as possible - the company I work for is a mortgage broker, so I share stuff from estate agents, conveyancers, housing lawyers etc - never a competing company!

I would also say, use your personal account to share as well. I get far more reshares by using my personal account than when I share via our company page.

Hope this helps,

Amelia

I'd include a button to say 'buy all ingredients for this recipe' and have it automatically add the ingredients to the users basket. Easy peasy user experience and you potentially get to increase the average basket value. Win win. You could also include individual buttons next to each product in the ingredients list on the recipe page (assuming it's labelled 'ingredients' and 'method'.)

I also wouldn't hid any text if you can help it - especially content that triggers a sale.

I just wanted to post up a message to everyone who has helped me with this problem.

First of all, please accept my sincere thanks. I REALLY appreciate everyone's contribution.

Now, I just wanted to tell you all what, as a company, we've decided to do.

1. We've written letters to: The company that copied us, their web designer and their host, asking them to remove the copied content within 14 days of the letters.
2. We've 'reported' them to Google, via one of the links that David posted (https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en)
3. We've reported them for scraping, using the link that Paddy posted

Hopefully, this problem will go away, but I hate to think how much business we may have lost as a result - the two pages they've copied are really important sales pages (remortgage and first time buyer) so for us, it's a massive shame.

Best wishes, and I hope you all have a great weekend!

Amelia

Hi,

Thank you for responding. I am using Google analytics experiments. You put some code on the original page and 'magically' the two pages get rotated to show approximately half the visitors one version, and the other half the other version. The new version is often called 'page-name-b' (for example) and if it wins then the content moved to the original version. The only exception to this rule was when we used a page called 'todays-mortgage-deals' - because I wanted to try and get it to list for more than just 'mortgage quote'.

Best wishes, and thank you again for responding

Amelia

They used to let you do the same with wikipedia, seems to not be there today when I search though. Other sites that have this are Amazon and The BBC. I haven't checked for any more though!

I assume it's only high traffic sites that get this.  I wonder what the threshold is?

Like you say: fascinating!

BTW, I noticed this ages ago, but that doesn't mean you're knowledge is outdated, it's probably one of those things Google has rolled out at different times in different countries. I can't actually remember the first time I saw it, but it was probably at least a year ago. I'm in the UK.

Best wishes,

Amelia

I get the same thing. Nobody on here seems to know the answer (I asked a similar question in the last week or so) - if the pages are there when you do a manual search then I wouldn't sweat it. I have taken the view that it's not worth worrying about!

Good luck Amelia

If you're aggregating content from different pages into one, then you may want to look at canonical tags. I'm sure someone much smarter than me will tell you how to do it

Hi,

We have a 'Why Choose us' section on most pages of one of our websites, and it hasn't affected our SEO in the slightest. It helps inform people as to why they should choose our company as opposed to the competition.

I don't believe it's 'garbage' - SO LONG as it's well executed. It drives conversion for us, so I think it's worth having.

I don't think it's worth having if there is nothing to differentiate yourself (or your client) but that's a different topic.

As far as SEO goes, it does no harm - so long as the rest of the content on the page is unique and useful.

Good luck, whatever you choose to do.

Amelia

Wish I could say the same. When they use incorrect English grammar in the request email, we send it round the team to have a giggle....

I would say if it's urgent and they need it fast then you can charge a premium for it because they are desperate. My dad used to work in publishing (not the same thing obviously) and the way he made money (made as much at the weekend as he did all week at his 9-5) was by working at weekends on 'rush' jobs where the original designer had failed and they needed something quick for the print run. Obviously this is completely different, but just sayin'!

Thank you Andy - you've struck a chord with me here. Good point, well made!

DA is a Moz measuring tool, which isn't used by Google. It is just an indication that the site will rank well (if it's high), or may have difficulty (if its low). PR is somewhat outdated, but is at least something google either still uses or used to use in their ranking algorithm.

What google looks at when determining which content is original is which one they find first. To make sure yours is found first use Google+ to share your new pages or twitter to tweet the links. Facebook can also be used for this purpose.

Best of luck,

Amelia

I've had problems and emailed them to ask what the devil is going on - they replied saying that they would compensate me for the time the service is down for. That was last week. I logged in this morning and my rankings were tracked successfully, so I emailed them to ask what compensation I will be getting... So far I haven't had a response, but they gave me a discount last year when a similar thing happened so I have every expectation of them fulfilling their promises.

Why redirect twice? I'd redirect to the https version from the old site/pages instead of going through two loops...

Also, did you do the change of address thing in webmaster tools? You can also remove urls from the index through webmaster tools, but I've only ever done this once when our IT guy f-ed up our dns settings so can't really help you much though it was pretty straight-forward if I remember rightly.

Good luck

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