My first site is trying to make it in it's niche, however, I am faced with one huge task, which is to compete with the existing authority site in the niche, a 5-year old site which has TONS of backlinks. However, my dillemma is that they have very unfair practices: 1. They scrape my content 2. They have 3 different mirror sites, which contain duplicate content. Furthermore, the pages from each mirror site are constantly indexed in a 2-tiered way, meaning that sometimes their duplicate content takes up SIX of the top 10 positions in the SERPS. It has been a long time since they started operating this way and I'm concerned that Google will never clamp them down, since they have such domain authority. What is your opinion/ experience with authority sites that have unfair practices?
If you're just getting started I would say pack-up and go elsewhere. Find a niche or a set of keywords that are relatively easy to rank for and concentrate on them. You'll learn far more and it will keep you motivated to see your site move up the rankings. There are still TONS of keywords out there where the top 4 or 5 sites have PR of less than 4 that can be very profitable.
Long tail keywords '4 or more words". I would develope a squeeze page and build a list if it is a hot niche. No need for S.E.O. It,e going this way anyway. Did you know that facebook Gets 200000 million visitors a year. Think about that.
and there are 2 billions searches performed on Google a day. Forget Facebook man..that's social networking. People don't search for things on Facebook
I have had sites in a similar situation. My advice would be not to give up until your site is well over a year old. Study the competition - can you get similar links for your sites? Can you build similar networks? No-one gets lucky or has an unfair advantage - just a result from spending time doing the right things to perform well.
Hi, Don't really understand, honestly. How could "the existing authority site" scrapes your content? Personally, I think if Google has not detected duplicated contents problems on those sites, it might not be a problem itself. Trying to analyze why your competitors rank higher and learning something from them would usually be a nice choice for the new followers, IMO. have a nice day,
Nah dont give up. How long have you had your site for. Once it hits about a year and half your trust should be up greatly. Google will prob clamp down on the soon hopefully but dont hold your breath incase they dont. Sites like that cant hold their own for too long by scraping content. Dont worry one day they will scrape too much and get done for dupe content. Your content existed first and google knows that so if they take a massive portion of your page they will bee seen as the theif. My advice would be to create great content, work on your sites usability and build blog and forum comment links form relevant discussuions on related threads (not DP) Even if you have to create new content several times a week id be doing that. Do you know much SEO? if not visit seomoz.org and start learning any other questions then ask
no they wont ..THERE IS NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY!!! to the OP, are you talking about one or two specific kws here or all of your main kws and longtails? you can quite often get through sites like this by starting with longer tail variations they're not covering properly. if youre saying that they take your pages whole, and anything you might rank for, they do instead, then either giving up, or blocking scrapers using robots are your 2 best options. you could block everything but Google / Yahoo etc so they cant scrape you?
SEOibiza is correct. There is NO penalty for dup content. It's a TINY bit harder to get to rank than original content, but with a few extra backlinks you can compensate for your shortcomings that result from it being duplicate. Duplicate content can and often does outrank original content. You just need to have an overal better ranking score (when all 200+ SEO factors are taken into account, not just the content-based factors) to outrank original content. That being said, if I had a site scraping my site (I have only had peeps trying to steal my blog posts or republish my ezinearticles without leaving my links) I find out who their ISP is using whois.domaintools.com and submit a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown request with their ISP. Every post or article that I have submitted a DMCA request for has been taken down within 48 hrs... Blogspot (because it's owned by Google) reacts even faster. I have had several taken down from there within 4-8 hours. All you have to do is be able to prove that you were the originator of that content (easy on a blog... just give them a link to the post on your site so they can see the post day... same w/ ezines). Once they investigate, they will take the offending pages down from the site with or without the webmaster's help. And if they get enough complaints about a particular website, they will take the site down. It's a liability for the hosting company to knowingly allow a repeated copyright infringing site to continue to operate. When you write an original article or post, it is INSTANTLY protected by copyright laws the second you first publish it. You do not have to register for a copyright or anything. It's implied that it is your original work and automatically covered. I would submit take down requests for EVERY piece of my content that they post. They will eventually get the message to stay away from your site. That being said, sounds like a VERY competitive market. If it is at all a PPC (Pills, Porn, Casino) or other type of shady industry (debt relief, etc.) then there will likely be an illusion of a sandboxing period (I have heard Cutts say at Pubcon that there isn't a sandbox per say, but in certain industries the way the algorithm works their often appears to be one). But if you want to be in it, the sooner you start, the sooner you can beat them. So I would start now... knowing it will be a year or more before you see the fruits of your labor.
One thing to note: I beat the authority site in all the worthy short tail terms, but now I want long tail traffic as well.
Write better content that is keyword rich, but not heavy. Look for places they don't link from like bookmarking sites, write more articles and press releases. It is possible to get in their hair, if you do not necessarily beat them.