Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Mark

I like the question and am going to handle it sentence by sentence: "What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word."

Nothing can stop anyone from doing this. Frankly, I could copy your question and put it on Moz as mine. It would probably take at least a few minutes for someone at Moz to catch it and take it down. But, nothing can stop me from doing it if I care less about the consequences.

"If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content."

First, this is an assumption many make and I do not necessarily agree with it. Second, within copyright law there are work products you can save over time that can assist you (but they are not foolproof) with a claim against someone, there are timestamps in many CMS systems that show when a doc was written, published, etc., You could resubmit a sitemap as soon as you publish, you could fetch as Google as soon as you publish (not the intent of fetch as Google, but you could), you can submit for copyright for $35US if you are in the U.S. (and if you had ten articles on the same site you could submit them all for the same $35), that submission to register would protect you, etc.

**Should site owners be worried about this type of practice? **Only if they care about:

• their site(s),
• their work,
• their client's work,
• the fact that until someone stands up to a bully, he keeps on being a bully.

_How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?_rel=author, rel=publisher

By utilizing these correctly, the moment you publish to the Internet, this is your article. Yes, someone else could take it and rewrite it, etc and then use rel=author (I know this because with the syndication services/news agencies "sharing content" we have had their authors take our content and place their byline on it - no we are not members of any syndication service so I call that theft even though the person is so used to being able to do that with articles written by others in the service they think they can do it to anyone.) but, in the end you have a record of being the one who first put it on the web and that you are the author.

Next, I think if your piece is valuable enough to you, you will copyright it. Value is your definition. With that copyright, you can report them to Google or Bing or Yahoo, etc. as taking copyrighted content and Google will eventually take action. REMEMBER - I am not talking about a copyright where you stuck a circle with a 'C' in it on your page; I am talking about a registered copyright. If they are hit with enough reports they are doing this the penalties for violating TOS can be severe.

Hope this helps you out,

Robert

Bob,

Remember, PR is arrived at mathematically and any change to a variable will cause a change to the result. That said, usually the minor changes with loss of a link here or there, addition of same, on page changes, we do not notice right away because Google only adjusts on occasion and not internet wide (I keep asking for the schedule but they won't give it to me). Now, if you had dropped from 4 to 0 or 1, that would be different in my opinion and a signal something was amiss in the eyes of Oz.

Best

LittleBigman

Without a bit more info there is no answer to exactly what the problem was. Given that you mentioned pages, and the last refresh of Panda was on the 18th and effected very few queries, I would guess that it was not (and given the quick reposition).

I would look at my traffic flow in analytics, etc. to see if there is something I could be missing on. Sometimes, even with the best site there will be a traffic drop for a day that goes unexplained. You did not mention how much the rankings changed, domain, etc. so it is hard to tell what could have been the cause. Glad for you it's back.

Robert

I sincerely apologize for having offended, I will speak with Sergey as I think its his fault...

Larry.

Alice nails the badge piece here. Always check this when I see it on any site.

Thomas, I think he is talking about the actual sitelink, not the Title Tag. He is wondering if he will get one for the non branded term since he has had it there for a year. And, the answer is it is up to Google.

Best and I agree re the Title Tag.

First, I would think about changing the approach with clients. We do a lot of web design here, too and we rarely put ourselves in as a link to our site. It must have a reason beyond getting our company a link.

Will you be penalized for doing reciprocal links. I do not believe so unless you are doing it on a big scale. My belief is that you won't help yourself either. Why, well you need anchor text in the eyes of Google, etc. So, you have to do a bit more work. I do not know if this will help you or encourage you, but I really liked this post by Wil Reynolds of SEER: On Google Making Liars out of the Good Guys.

I personally would say if you do a few manual submissions it may help, but another place you can rock your own world is Local SEO: Google Places, Bing Bus. Portal, Yahoo Local, Citation sites like Yelp, Citysearch, etc. Here is a good list I was turned on to by Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design: http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

If you do the citation sites correctly, verify your listings on the engines, and maybe consider shelling out the $295 for Yahoo Directory, it would likely help you a ton.

Best

GreenHornet77,

First the easy answer: Use a third party like Yest? No, don't in my humble opinion.

As to correcting the address, are you dealing with Google +/places? Are the others important for the business?

For Google + for business (Places), you should be able to edit the address. You can watch after the change and if need be make an edit in Google Map Maker that may well help.

For citation sites like Yelp, Citysearch, etc. those can be changed as well. If this is not something you have done before, I would suggest that you do it as a way to learn the ins and outs of it if you are planning to assist a lot of clients with their local. Our Local Coordinator started with us a year ago and because she has done this over and over it takes a lot less time. So, your first few may take a little longer, but after you know the ropes it should lessen your workload.

For us, I would say if you were changing 10 citation sites, etc. you should allocate an hour per site.

Best,

Robert

Keri, 
This is why I always have thought you were a rock!!! You are still my hero.

Luke

Even with 4 out of 24 I would think your issue will likely fall into line with this post by Barry Schwartz with SearchEngine Roundtable about manual link actions

Even if they were to go to this degree, the only pages that would be effected would be the ones with the links. And, it is likely the degree of that effect would be the mitigation of any algorithmic impact from the "bad" links.

I still think that by taking a bit less drastic approach, you can achieve your aims. Understand, there is no guarantee in that, I am telling you what I would do. I can tell you that I was looking at a client site yesterday and when we took on the site in Jan/Feb, she had some of the worst looking link pyramids, etc. I have seen. It was junk.

We changed hosting which changed IP and obviously linking C blocks. But, we did nothing but watch the links. We did not go after dropping them, etc. In May, Penguin arrives and we see changes begin. But, we did nothing but watch.

As you can see there are changes, but on the whole even with all the BS there is nothing totally detrimental. NOTE: This site sells an extremely high dollar product (7 figures) so a minor fluctuation in ranking does not effect it on the order it would an ecommerce site for example. But, I am encouraged at seeing how the effect on DA is negligible and it is now rising, etc. Also, look how we have lost LRD's but mozTrust is rising. Interesting at least.

So, I do not know if this is helpful, but I certainly hope it is.

Best

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David

1. No, I am assuming it is not a mirror of the old without the .html and you have created better UI/UX and therefore different url structure.

2. Assuming the old pages are not bookmarked by people who are paying customers, you do not need to redirect them if there is no benefit to be derived from the exercise.

3. I think minimally you create issues for paying customers when you have a mix of urls like that. You run the risk (unless there are very few product pages) of also ending up with duplicate content, etc. Just clean it all up and lose the .html. Redirect the pages where there is value to you or your customers. On the ones you do not redirect, make sure there is a way for someone to find what they are looking for from the 404 page.

Hope this helps you out,

Robert

Project#Labs

The key words used here are quality and relevant. For us (we have copywriters on board) as we see our need for more and more blogs, pages, etc. we will likely outsource some of that content. If someone were writing for one of our client sites, say medical equipment sales, and they could write relevant posts of at least 200 words we would likely pay $25 to $50 depending on the sites they were published to and the quality of the article/post. Obviously, the anchor text and links would have to be there as well. 
We do occasionally pay more when we know the writer and have seen quality from them before.

Hope this helps.

Edit (By more, I mean up to $100 per).

Jason,

Client is the key word here. First, you have to talk with them and make them aware of the plusses and minuses of the change. Let them decide is my advice. As to if it were mine, I would not change the index page at first and would construct what pages I am going to have for given terms. So, if on index page the most crucial keyword is red widget, it stays and I start looking at how to set up other pages and maximize red widget where it is.

Obviously, over time the chances of maintaining or growing a ranking is higher with a specific page (assuming the same effort, etc.). If you do link buildiing and set it to only go to index page, that will be more of an issue. So, your linking should be specific to what you wish to rank.

Remember, as you start to make changes, chances are you will drop before you begin to climb. If the client is aware of that going in, you have an ally. No, there is no hard rule on when the increase will happen.

I hope this helps you clarify,

Robert

I found your work on this quite interesting and I have wondered about it from time to time myself. A couple of things to consider are that many of us who have been on Moz a while have had points in time where we were able to be more engaged and others when we are less engaged. So the longer someone is on MOZ, they are less likely to have a consistent input. (Also, I appreciated Keri's input about former employed Mozzers, etc.) 
For me, as someone who has been on Moz a while, the real value has come from relationships I achieve as the result of contacting other Mozzers who posted or answered questions. Really, there are too many to list, but I can say there are at least a half dozen people that I met through Moz who are regular contacts for me. There are several of those with whom I have contracted out SEO work to who did/do a great job.

Another thing someone may have mentioned already is that if you were answering questions 3 or 4 years ago you would have gotten less thumbs up, etc. versus today as Moz has improved things like getting people to say yes or no their question was answered.

Thanks again for taking the time to aggregate all that data, it is quite interesting.

Just amazing how people must be in the industry in some way or they are just lambs for these guys. I can understand how someone who is not used to what all we deal with would just go, oh yeah, gotta renew.....

When I am uber rich I am going to hire a bunch of the best devs in the world so that we can develop mind numbing bot worms that seek out and pee on these guys while they sleep...

Dan,

This is a very good answer. Just to emphasize, probably the most important piece with a "dev" site is the last one Dan mentions: Password protection. Once you clean up the issue, add it then you should not have the issue going forward.

Even with robots.txt on our dev sites and our design studio, we have had pages end up on the SERPS. Because of the DA of our design studio (where clients go to approve a comp, etc.) we recently had a new political client's comp ranking for a search term on page one. (Ahead of their actual site (we were building another to replace it). So, even with robots.txt, there is still no guarantee it will not be crawled.
Adding password protection will assist in that.

Lastly, if you have someone building you a site, and they say they do not want to take down the dev version after your launch, tell them you do not wish to pay them. It will go down. That is unreasonable. I cannot think of a reason to keep the dev version live once the client site launches.

Again, good job Dan.

Great Fence,

I am going to remain calm here and simply say, No.

I have looked at them and I just cannot wrap my head around the massive outpouring or the content issues. Too many of both PRWeb and PRNewswire releases are amateurish and that cannot be ameliorated by the fact they can run it out on AP or have a list of 6,000,000,000 places they send it to.

Think about this: look at the releases of others and you will see what bad is. If you are going to do this, make sure you write something that is more than your company name and a retweet of someone's retweet of retweet about some event.

We have our own copywriters, train them weekly, keep them abreast, watch as their quality content is stolen by also rans...think news services, people that Huff, etc. The issue today is not simply creating content with your company name attached to it to get links, it is about creating quality content that no one else created and that someone wants.

These companies make a lot of money on people who are looking for an easy way out. There isn't one. Sorry,

Hope it helps,

Also, I would suggest you go to AP and see what you can do with them. As an AP member, you can use their content and they can use yours and the prices are less. You won't necessarily have the outlet but there are ways.

Jake

Nice hit with the Tag Manager. I did not know about it... Learn something everyday and that is what I love about this gig.

Best.

JPretz,

IMO this is one of those cost benefit analysis questions: Is rewriting the product descriptions worth the result change? Well, you could test it on some percentage of products to see if it changes outcomes. Then decide. 
If the site is massive and the task daunting, testing will at least give you direction. But, at the end of the day, the more you differentiate your site and those duplicate products the better off you are. Think about every competitor selling a Blue Oyster Sweater. If they all use the manufacturer's description, there is no differentiation. If you differentiate and do so with images, text, etc. who will they see. What if you are using markup and they are not, etc.?

I like being differentiated.

Best,

Even though you believe the urls are going to be the same, I would suggest running screaming frog before and after just to be sure. If the site is smaller this is less critical, but for a larger site, where you can lose valuable rankings, etc. I would check it. 
I would make sure you are indexing after change and resubmit sitemap as soon as change takes place.

Best