Could google penalize me? The orgnial source. Is is google smart enough to know. BACKSTORY I have a website. And One of my competition copied this website..... And simply added more links. (He is partners with a link exchange service.) For 3 months - MY WEBSITE WAS # 6 (20,000 links) and His was 3rd page. (100,000 links) THEN - BOOM, now......I just fell off the earth. - Does this duplicate content have anthing to do with it. Any suggestions? Just re-write my whole website ?
try to contact with the owner of the site. If he is not listening then go to google and report them. if he uses adsense then report to adsense also.
Report to his host as well. You fell off the serps because Google awards the site with the most backlinks.
report it to the webhost. if you have a proof that he copied your content, for example, in case you had a blog the date when the articles where published will be there. If you have a proof that you posted content faster than he did than he could be easily banned or go to court.
You can also gain proof via archive.org which keeps a copy of all websites on the web and they provide the date when they saved their copy too. They have a backlog of updates however--6 months to a year so hopefully your site has been up for awhile. Next time you write a page save it with a browser copy so you have proof when you put it up. the more proof you can offer the better. I have an indepth article on how to contact hosts, google, etc. on my website which you can see from my profile.
ok problem is this. he uses OF SHORE HOSTING. IN RUSSIA. I reported them 4 times. I also reported to his REGISTAR. NOTHING. The russians are a joke, they tell me come to russia, they speak like criminals. And register.com says they are protected under there policy.
I am more worried about GOOGLE then reporting them to people. ARE WE SURE GOOGLE doesnt know. "THIS WAS HERE FIRST" or do they AUTOMATICALLY simply give it to the person with more links. In this case. LINKS ARE EVERYTHING. With enough links. you can over take anyone. This is my point. Not reporting a russian host. BUT LINKS. Have they gotten this powerful and has google gotten so simple, all you need to do is S I M P L Y - ADD LINKS!! I guess so,.
reporting wont do anything. trust me! this happened to my site and i was out of serps for a while. finally i sucked it up and reworded the whole site... next thing you know i was back in a couple days.
Honestly, You can't do anything. Neither can google's sophisticated search bots find which site has original content. Build more content on same content is the best you can do.
If you have copyrights then you can file a case against him. Or you can show copyrights to google & report his site. It will definitely help you...
In order for a foreign site to be ranking in US they need to have a host in the US. Contact the host. Also, if their host is also in Russia, then unless your rank has dropped because of this copying I wouldn't worry about it. Google is usually wise to the antics of scrapers from other countries and rarely lets them outrank sites in the US (unless your site is new). If all else fails I would focus on getting more links to your site, but do it manually one by one and only quality links. If the russian site has 10,000 links you can almost guarantee they are not quality links. A handful of quality will outweigh mega thousands of junk. Also write some good quality content for your site that people will want to link to. Offer free services, free samples, etc. I write a lot of articles of interest to web designers and graphic tutorials and that's where I get most of my links.