I just noticed this afternoon after my daily rankings check that a bunch of single product rankings have fallen off the map. These are all terms that I was in the top 3 for. Anyway, after doing some research I found that someone on ebay copied my personalized product descriptions, and now for every page that they copied, the page that was copied is now in the supplemental index and not ranking. The rest of the pages on the site rank the same. I'm looking for suggestions on how to get this corrected. Obviously I can re-write the descriptions, but they are my personal descriptions, so why should I have to change what I wrote. So far, I have emailed the offender, and ebay. Since we are actually having a loss of sales due to this, we are fully prepared to take legal actions against the company. Anyway the ebay listing that I first found is item: 7574008712.The page it was copied from is: http://www.merchantequip.com/nurit-2085.php Any suggestions would be appreciated. I personally would have ruled this off as a coincidence, but the only pages affected were ones that were copied. Just too much of a coincidence for me.
I would contact them and advise them of your intent and give them a reasonable amount of time to comply. If they do not then I would seek other action such as a letter from your lawyer. Good Luck with this and hope it works out for you. Kevin
Also contact Ebay, they should be good about copywrite issues. Also dont know if it will do you anygood but keep the emails and give google an email, you just never know what they can do If they are feeling kind enough they may re-instate your pages. pray for that one Brad
I am not sure you are getting a duplicate content penalty. This search shows results for a part of the description you say the ebay seller copied and you don't feature? Normally if the duplicate content penalty was being applied you would not feature in this search but you would feature in this search for the exact phrase.
Its not on every datacenter. Most of the big daddy ones that I was looking through yesterday showed the described results. When I searched for any specific text from my page on the datacenters I only get the ebay listings and none from my site at all. Hopefully it is just a google hiccup. The whole purpose of writing personal descriptions is to set one's self apart from everyone else. Penalizing the site that originally wrote the descriptions just doesn't seem right. I was able to contact the offending ebay member and they said they would look into it. Hopefully the whole thing can get cleared up on a personal level. I hate getting lawyers involved, unless it is absolutely necessary.
The point is that if you search for "some text from your website" and you are not in the results then it is not a duplicate content penalty. The duplicate content penalty only seems to apply when the search term is NOT enclosed in quotes.