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Hi Kibin Firstly it's unlikely that their scraped content will affect your rankings - Google generally knows who originated it. However: Do you have the hreflang tag on your website? specifying your language and location? If theirs has this as well then technically you are targetting a different country, so there should be no duplicate content if you added it. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I would tell Google about the URL and add a sample 10 URLs first: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard. Telling them is an absolute must even if it's only a few URLs. Also email the hosting company informing them that they are hosting copied content and that the penalties are severe. Finally, write to the company themselves and tell them/warn them that you are going legal and send them a cease and desist legal letter. I am sure you can knock one up for a few dollars from a friendly solicitor. Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGc_jc3Oznk It's a bit long but worth it. Do all of these things. Regards Nigel

There was a big local shake-up around 10/25 - were you potentially ranking in local markets for some of these phrases (they don't seem like local queries, but just thought I'd ask)? I'd have to agree with Marie that the timing suggest this wasn't Penguin, but Google hasn't been very forthcoming on Penguin data refreshes. Your link profile looks pretty clean to me, and your site isn't really large enough to have large-scale content issues. Those services pages look a little keyword-targeted and border on thin, but if you're talking about a handful of them, I doubt it's enough to cause you serious problems. If you rolled out hundreds of them that were all just variations on the same core keyword phrases, that would be different. On the other hand, if those pages specifically target the terms that dropped, it's hard to ignore that fact. Did you do any targeted link-building to those pages. I'm seeing one weird thing - OSE is showing a ton of recent links from Scoop.it - across a large number of pages - but when I check the source site, I'm not seeing any links. It's possible you got a temporary boost from some links that got removed, but that's really hard to track.

Why not just open up their link data (on the Moz toolbar) and take a look at where they're getting these links from?

Charles, Thanks for the kudos on the site design. We've spent the better half of January sprucing it up with bread crumbs, service pages, a new layout, the custom illustrations, etc. The goal was to increase user experience while also improving the SEO friendliness of the site. It was a lot of (positive) change and that's why I'm excited to start seeing some results and fruits of our labor! I didn't know that you could submit a url to WMT... in fact, we haven't been using WMT very much at all. I just poked around and found out how to do that, so that's done. Thanks! As for backlinks, we did get a fair number of quality ones (and one coming early this week from eHarmony's blog yet too)... so I guess I'll just have to be patient for that to show up in OSE. We're still a pretty new SEOMoz account, so I'm just a bit antsy to start seeing some of our metrics improve. I guess I just need to be a bit patient Thanks for the response!

Thanks donford, that's very helpful. After thinking it over, I feel it's best to keep the urls as simple as possible and use something like /s/essay-editing for them (the 's' representing services). Thanks!

Hi there! Thanks for writing in!  I checked your account it seems that the crawl was finished.  Various factors sometimes can affect the speed at which Roger will check out your site, it usually tries to be as efficient as possible and not take the scenic route, every once in a while he gets stuck trying to resolve something on the site (crossword puzzle maybe) which can cause the crawl to last a little longer.  We're constantly keeping track of how long the crawls take for our customers and try to come up with a better more efficient Roger! If your next crawl is taking more than a day (24 hours), i would send us a ticket at help@seomoz.org.  Thanks again for writing in! Best, Peter SEOmoz Help Team.

That page is indexed and prweb links should show up as links. i wouldn't obsess over it though because links from known pr services like pr web won't help your SEO according to Matt Cutts. the very first link to your site in that article is broken btw - definitely make sure all of your links are working properly before pushing out your releases

You're not considering a lot of factors that go into SEO: Page speed could be better on #1. Over optimization on page 2 - with many links with anchor text that includes "editing" "editing" appears 80 times on page 1, 66 times on page 2, despite page 2 having more text.  I'm not saying this is a case of keyword density/spamming it, but maybe they're on the line and #2 is under it. Better overall inbound link authority to #2 possibly. Page 2 has repetition of both keywords in the title.  Google already punishes this if you don't have noODP by replacing your title with a more suitable one.  They aren't big fans of duplication but even so, #2 has a much different title. Co-citation.  Even with a better DA and PA, the related inbound links may be more relevant to essay editing on page 1.  Also, more domains may point directly at the subpage essay-editing.html than they do the absolute page at /essay-editing/index.php Analytics matter.  If #2 bounce rate is double #1, and the time on site for #1 is 4 minutes longer per visitor and they get more traffic through an email list that actually stays on site, they'd have a natural boost in the "analytics" department, as well. There are always a million reasons why one site could or may outrank another.  All you can realistically do is improve your site as much as possible, create relevant links back, get citations that all match, engage on social and have a site that responds well when people click it.

EGOL, Firstly, I want to state what a truly great answer this is. Since most people are not playing in this niche, they may not appreciate the insights you've pointed out in such little time. Content is going to be a large part of our strategy.  While others have done this to an extent, you'll notice the same bland, boring stuff recycled over and over.  There's a huge opportunity in this space to take content to a new level and create truly great stuff.  That's what we're planning on doing. Regarding creating multiple service pages for these specific keywords... I think you're absolutely correct.  When I can't figure things out, I tend to think obsessively about them until I believe I have an answer.  Last night, before heading to a friend's birthday party (and before you answered this question), I reconsidered my standpoint (also after I poured through some Adwords search and conversion data for our site. I decided that the best approach would be to create a general "essay editing" page with footer links to pages like "fix my essay", "revise my essay", etc.  Like you, I realized that there actually is different intent for these search terms than there is for "essay editing service" and I greatly appreciate your answer in helping confirm my hunch. The one place I do believe you're not quite spot on is where you say, _"This is not an easy business niche.   Your competitors have been around long enough that they will not be defeated quickly or with little effort." _  This niche has not been disrupted like many niches have in the recent years.  The players, in my opinion, have become complacent and nobody has been attempting to become an industry leader here (I believe there's definitely an opportunity to do so).  The guys ranking toward the top of the SERPS do not have very impressive link profiles, they don't create good content (if any), their user experiences and design of their websites are awful. I'm not saying it won't take effort and time to surpass them, but I do believe it's one of the more "doable" niches out there. Again, thanks for the great answer.  If you've got any more insights, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Cheers!

Thanks Sebastian.  I was starting to think nobody would answer this I've been thinking about it and was considering only going after links with DA higher than our own.  We currently have a DA of 39, so I'd be looking at stuff 40 and above. However, taking into account keyword difficulty does make sense and adjusting our minimums accordingly.

As long as you force all pages to https and build links to the https version, it's nothing to worry about. From memory, Matt Cutts said either one is fine.

Hmm, OK thanks!  I'm a bit confused looking at Yahoo!'s directory.  Do you get to set the title and description, or do they just pull that all from your meta data.  They have a place to describe your listing, but it's not evident that it will actually serve as the description.

Glad it was helpful - good luck and I look forward to more Q&As with you!