Duplicate Content

I do remember that Matt Cutts says duplicate content is not an issue if the aim is not to spam or something.

Should we change our domain name after not getting good seo results and recieving a DMCA removal notice from Google Search? That notice was for one page only but we have duplication on other pages too.
This is an e-commerce website with over 100 pages. We discovered that the freelancer content writer he had hired had copied content from competitors websites.
So should we change the domain or just fix the content on the same domain name? We have done over 1.5 month of SEO and while there was no improvement in rankings (the targetted keywords are not even indexed) the data from OSE, Ahrefs, GWT and GA does show some improvement.

Please suggest a good strategy. Thanks

 

Most people don't know exactly what is duplicate content. Duplicate content is the same content that is in your website twice or more. Otherwise if you are not spamming you can have same content on your website and other websites. You can write an article an submit it to several article directories if your aim is not to spam where it won't affect as you have mentioned what Matt Cutts has said. If you make a research you can find the same quality articles or contents on several article directories and websites.

 

Okay thanks. What are your thoughts on my case: should we stick to the same domain or should we use a new one?

 

First of all, you have every right to take action against that copywriter. They have acted fraudulently and done damage to your business and the businesses of those they stole from. They also risked you being charged for stealing that content from those other companies and sites. The very least you should get is your money back for the poor service they gave.

This should be a lesson to all, don't simply pay someone to do a job and trust that they are legitimate. There are thousands of people doing this out there, and if you pay next to nothing to someone in a distant country to do this for you the results will not be of good quality. Hire someone with a reputation, value the content they provide properly and create a relationship with them for future work.

As for overcoming the content problem, you can simply rewrite the pages with unique content and you will recover from it. It's going to take more work and effort to start again from scratch than it would to just write new content for those pages.

Google loves fresh content, so if you keep a good pace and work gradually to rectify this you should start to see an improvement in the traffic you get through organic search within a month or two.

 

Good idea would be to just rewrite content and then submit your sitemap to Google again (Google loves updated content).

 

I wouldn't change the domain name if I were you.

 

Depends on how well your site performs - if it's notably not ranking well, I would change the domain (but that could come with losing your brand). I would also immediately remove the competitors content - you're liable to be sued (I wrote several small description blurbs for a products on a site, which were widely stolen by competitors - and they're lucky I didn't press charges)

 

Well, it is too simple. Just write unique articles for your website. One article must be at least 60% unique to be considered by Google. They are alerting you because this kind of technique is being used by "black haters" whom one or two unique articles and than just spun this articles to many websites or blogs to create some back link's.

 

Stick with the domain. Age ranks well in Google.

 

Don't change your domain name. Just focus on writing quality content that would definitely be informative to your readers. Advertise it also so as to improve your rankings.

 

duplicating content or spinning content does not provide good SEO & its also effect on your web traffic, so kindly use fresh written articles with good keywords