I have just noticed that my articles aren't being ranked as well in google as they usually are. They usually go to the first page for at least a few days. But over the last week or so they aren't. I did a few searches for the terms that I was targetting and noticed that another website is ranking above mine for the terms with my articles on their site. The articles appear on their site a few minutes after they have been published on the article site, so they must be doing it automatically or having notifications sent to them. I think they may be getting the articles indexed on their site before they are on the actual article sites and then my articles are being awarded the duplicate content penalty. When you click on the result in google to go to their site it is a just a black page full of ads. The reason I know that my full article is on there because it appears in Google's description and you can navigate to it from the home page of their site. This has to be some violation of Google's rules in itself? The site is: link roll.com Is anyone else having this problem? Here is a screenshot of one of them:
I wouldn't even bother trying to contact Google, I would contact wherever you have placed your articles and tell them that the content you have submitted was taken and provide the link. Also, you might do a WHOIS and contact the guy outright. If you want to go overboard, have an attorney send them a threatening letter.
I noticed the same for some of my sites too. Google rankings are sometimes quite unstable. For example one of my sites used to be nr.4 then the next day it ranked nr.25 ! A week later it was in the top 10 again... why? nobody realy knows.. I agree with the crocodile ,) it's not worth contacting them because you won't get a reply to your question. What's getting on my nerves is that websites with high PR can suddenly pop up before you in terms of ranking, just because they added a new keyword to their code which happens to be relevant to the content of your site. I don't think this is fair. I might have a very good site with high quality content but still loose to a big player using just one keyword and not even having the same main topic.. Nick Stone
This is a common issue. When I used to get these kind of issue, I used to report this to the article directories where my article is and then tell to the guys who had stolen my article. However, most of the cases, They do not remove it, but some cases they did remove. However, you can take action against that guy as stated above too. But I don't think, there are guys who does not care it... , but try it.
This happens to me a lot. I have a site that is doing good than takes a big dip. It takes a while to find out who stole my articles and content and get it straightened out. But don't bother contacting Google, just write more articles.