Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There's a lot that could explain the change.

I would look at all the competitors websites in your industry, not just one. Try to find a common trend between the ones that went up and the ones that may have gone down.

Also use tools such as google optimize and web.dv measure to compare the two websites.

Lastly, take a look your on-page analytics from GA for mobile in the past 3 months and see if there is a significant decrease or an anomaly in how users are interacting with your website.

All of these can be factors that may have been there all along and simply amplified by the algorithm update.

Once you pinpoint the cause, it will be much easier to fix.

Good luck!

You can go with what Nathan said.

However, a better long term solution  would be to use a theme that allows you to control what is displayed on mobile vs what is displayed on desktop (or any other screen sizes).

A good theme that allows you to do this should not be creating duplicate content.

I would say it all depends on how much content you are copying. I would say if 10% of the content you have on the page is copied content from the vendor and 90% is original, you should be fine.

You might also be able to further differentiate it but taking the copied content and putting it into your own words. I don't know what business you're in, but for example, take the approach that a sales person working for your company would take when talking about the products. How would they describe the company (vendor) that makes it and what buzzwords do you use to sell the product?

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,

You can go with what Nathan said.

However, a better long term solution  would be to use a theme that allows you to control what is displayed on mobile vs what is displayed on desktop (or any other screen sizes).

A good theme that allows you to do this should not be creating duplicate content.

There's a lot that could explain the change.

I would look at all the competitors websites in your industry, not just one. Try to find a common trend between the ones that went up and the ones that may have gone down.

Also use tools such as google optimize and web.dv measure to compare the two websites.

Lastly, take a look your on-page analytics from GA for mobile in the past 3 months and see if there is a significant decrease or an anomaly in how users are interacting with your website.

All of these can be factors that may have been there all along and simply amplified by the algorithm update.

Once you pinpoint the cause, it will be much easier to fix.

Good luck!