I’m sure all bloggers here are aware of Google panda effect and those who have suffered from Panda should read How to recover from Google panda effect.
So I have been working hard to make sure that we recover the lost traffic after panda effect as soon as possible.
While working on SEO of my blogs, I realized that many blogs which are using auto RSS method to copy content and publishing it are ranking higher in the search engine.
This problem is not with my blogs but also with major blogs including Google engineer Matt Cutt blog.
This is one serious issue and probably shows why Google panda is not very effective. Google panda update is supposed to remove all low-quality content and such auto RSS blogs from the search engine.
Though one thing is for sure, this panda effect works on domain side and not on individual posts.
Here is a screenshot in which I have searched for a sentence from my blog post on CallingAllGeeks in Google and I don’t see CallingAllGeeks listed anywhere and I can see lots of other blogs who have copied posts directly:
How to outsmart content copier and get back lost Ranking?
In this process, we will be taking care of lots of things including reporting it to Google, getting free backlinks and also make sure that for future posts these websites will not rank more than your blog.
Remove content from Web search or Complete delete it:
This is a lengthy but most profitable and working method. Report all such blog posts which have copied posts from your blog to Google. Google will review your request and within a couple of days or week, those blogs will be removed from the Google web index.
Here is the link where you can report such copied posts. For BlogSpot blog copying your content, you can again report using the same link. One advantage of reporting such BlogSpot blog is, Google either delete the post or if the blog is spammy in nature, complete blog will be deleted by Google. If it’s a self hosted WordPress blog, you can report to their webhosting company and send them a DMCA notice.
Get Free backlinks:
Anyways, no matter what, these auto blogs will not stop. They don’t care about ranking as it’s all automated and even if they rank for certain posts they are happy about it. Use WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin will add a link back to your blog post and blog. This way you will be getting free backlink. To make most out of it, I have also added 2-3 extra keywords and link to get free backlinks.
Partial RSS feeds:
I know many of you hate Partial RSS feeds and so do I. Though for now, you need to start offering partial feeds instead of complete feed. This way Google will find those Auto RSS blogs as offering low quality content and over the time you will get back your lost ranking and traffic.
In WordPress you can go to Settings> Reading and select summary as an option for syndication feeds. This will enable partial feeds.
I have tried and tested these three methods and for my new posts I’m not missing any traffic and they are getting indexed without any issue. I’m sure those who are facing a similar issue will find this post useful and will get their ranking soon.
Do let us know if you are using any other method to get back your lost ranking because of content scrapper blogs?
Great Advice – But If these kind of auto blogs remove then how they make money 🙂 😛 – Help others so that Someone Help you – 🙂 Its joke – Anyhow its a great advice for bloggers – Thanks Harsh
Harsh, One could also try
1.Tynt for auto attribution on copy-paste,
2.Disable right click aswell
and partial rss feeds as you mentioned is also a good option.
Nice Tips Harsh But last one is cool “Partial RSS feeds” .By using this we can easily get good ranking of our blog without any big effort
its very sad news….For my site also, its happening
very sad on Google part
Harsh, you should have also posted screenshot from Matts blog, which is ranking lower than copied ones
ATUL
I know the reason why this is happening its a misplaced function error in their algorithms. Not only content copy ranks better but many other websites that are highly ranked and have less of text content like blogs and more of PHP are ranked bad….except of sites like FB , twitter etc. Panda algorithms are not at all appreciated.
Nice and quite informative post. However, I fail to understand why it would behave so – i mean, copied ones ranking higher. This is something very basic of how google indexing works and how could they released google panda without this much basic testing. I am sure, they themselves would not like the genuine sites to lost because of all this.
If all professional bloggers work for reporting spammers to Google it will surly work i.e if Google receives more complaints regarding a spammer it will surely take action.
In simple words,
more complaints > Fast action
So I am going to report these type of websites to Google.
What about you guys?
It’s really frustrating..I even face the same problem.Have reported many such blogs recently to Google Team.
These fellow even hot linking images which is even frustrating !
mine is a new blog and i have not done much of seo and backlinking. I normally get 10-20 uv per day from all sources. But suddenly my one post hit the first position in google as soon as i published the article and that day the traffic went to 9k uv and thereafter i am getting good amount of traffic and my most of the articles get good ranking in google. Earlier my articles takes so many days to get indexed but now they get indexed very soon. Might be panda effect has shown a positive improvement in my blog
I am also experiencing this pretty badly. I lost nearly half of my traffic (over 10k! visits) because of these content scrapers. For many keywords, many have copied my content (including my watermarked image) and still they rank higher than me!
And another thing is that, I have got a penalty from Google. I think the reason is because they have copied my content and Google have interpreted it wrongly (they assume that I copied their content!). Need to try a reconsideration request.
Hope they fix it soon. BTW good write up Harsh and thanks for bringing up this article. Tweeted and shared!. And I’ll promote this article as much as I can.
That was the exact problem which should have been sorted out with panda.. but @harsh I believe I was unable to actually get what measured you suggested us to adopt for being on safer side..
I’m fed up of dealing with sites auto posting from my blog’s RSS feed. Normally I knock at the doors of DMCA to deal with such copy cats. But ,later I disabled the Full RSS feed option and had great affect on SEO since then.
Hey Harsh, Can u help me , How I can take action against the Self Hosted AutoBlogs, Because I am not able to Understand the term “Send Them a DMCA Notice”, Please help me bro 🙁
You have to send DMCA notice from here. http://www.google.com/dmca.html
On successful completion you will get a link.Submit that link to hosting company.
I’m a newbie blogger and my blog is just three-four months old. So I think my blog hasn’t been yet targeted by the cop-cats. Though I’m having some pingbacks from some auto blogs and Google Panda hasn’t affected me badly. Actually I’m getting much more traffic from search engine than last two months.
And regarding the RSS fact, I’m using the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast which has a RSS option from where you can simply add a footer (even in header) message in your articles. So no need to use another plugin for that 🙂
Great Idea Harsh, using RSS Feed is good method to outsmart them. And thanks for the link to complain to Google.
One more question, I found some of my post excerpts and titles are published on some sites and they send me trackback. When I visit that site, it is all collection of such excerepts only. There is no full post on any of them. Am I been harmed with those posts? Should I take action against them as well?
Suresh yes such website will take away your traffic. Do a search for your existing post and you kight find couple of such blogs (Copying excerpts) are ranking well. So the traffic which you deserve is being taken by those blogs. I’m not sure but I believe Google doesn’t remove such content as they allow excerpt along with link back…
Hi Harsh…I have visited “socialgeeks.net”. All the post there are theft from your blog “CallingAllGeeks”. Have you noticed that…??
Hey Sophia
Yes I have been reporting the same to Google and almost 40% of links from that blog has been removed from Google and after changing my feeds from full to partial, I can notice they are not getting indexed properly. More over sending a DMCA notice to their hosting company to complete remove that website.
Thanks for your concern.
🙂 You have done a clever work doing this… Almost all the posts on Social Geeks.net now show just a summary and saying the original link in the very start 😉
I just checked one more thing.. you have got 5 additional backlinks in the form of Related posts included from RSS feed into that bugger Socialgeeks’ blog… 😀
Harsh why don’t you make a DMCA complaint to remove the whole website. He is repeatedly copying your content..At the end of the form there is an option to do that.
Ricky it’s done and good thing is that this blog is completely out of Google for now. And admin contacted me to now to report any more and he stopped rss syndication and also he is removing all the content. 🙂
The problem here is that if the visitor can turn a partial feed into a full… so can the spammer very easily. They’ll have automated tools for that soon if they don’t already (which we don’t know but I think its fair to assume they do since it exists). That means the people losing out here are your actual visitors by switching to partial feed.
Another thing to note – and I know this for fact since I’ve picked up several pieces of autoblog software to really look at them and figure out what’s going on is that the best ones include tools to strip all the links out of the imported content. While there obviously are low grade ones (where the footer links help) the well known ones already put a stop to the backlink “hack” for this abuse.
We have to be real careful that we do not do things which make like difficult, challenging or just annoying for our readers while we continue to chase down idiots in the background. That’s the (time consuming) challenge.
Kimberly
Kim I agree with your statement here that even Spammers can convert partial feed into complete feed. But they are always lazy and that’s why I have seen many auto blogs showing partial feed. And this is just for the time being before Google will fix their Algo and make sure no auto RSS blogs get into this list.. Once Google fixes their algo, we can again revert back to complete feed from Partial. I have tried and tested this method to get back my lost traffic on my other blog: http://www.callingallgeeks.org
LOL socialgeeks copied your partial feed . nice way using rss feed . I am going to insert some more links to it ..
The good thing is that blog is out of Google now 🙂
Thanks to Google DMCA.
I noticed this happening on some occasions prior to panda update even. The likely cases for this were when we syndicate our website content to content partners or publish the same content on ezine publishing websites.
Copy- cat can not save its life in the coming time, I think. However, the simple to cope with it as you mentioned in the post is very handy, especially RSS footer. Now I understand that why sometime when I copy a blog spot to translate into my language on some blog, there has been always a link back, even on MS Word.
With some huge crowd blog, get some free link back is a great way to overcome that phenomenon.
Getting free backlink is good but not very effective. You should make sure that in return of one backlink, they don’t steal your traffic from your hard work. And it’s an auto feed blog, they don’t deserve any traffic. You should also consider changing your feeds to partial feeds: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/why-you-should-offers-partial-feeds-after-google-panda-update.html
Its showing because , U have pasted full description in google search bar.
So, its showing those pages , who have same content
No bro. Even if the small keywords are searched, it is like that. I too experience the same for many of my posts.
No, not true… I experienced this with so many of my posts. Even for short highly searched keywords.
Anyway, great post!
Sorry i am commenting at the top so that most of the people can read it.Very true Mr-Harsh,i do face this problem as these are growing days of my blog so,needs good traffic.But we all forgot that the aim of Google Panda is to remove the unreal post sites,sites who copy the content,don’t do real researches.So for that stuff Google is testing each and every post of every site possible.Like if you use WordPress.com stats plugin,go and check that the post with maximum visits is changing daily.Google is testing all the content,be prepared guys.Without testing no one can determine which is better and which is worst,so a quality test is going on and if you see search results of sites with copied content then Google made you judge the better and worst. Mr-Harsh your help to recover from Panda update influence is quite helpful,a WordPress user must follow it.
Hoping this might help mate bloggers.
Jagan thanks for your insight but I don’t get much idea from your comment. You mean Google re-ranking every page depending on it’s usability? It’s impossible and if Google will do, they will disrupt all ranking for so many days. People will notice huge up and down in every day traffic.
According to me, till now Panda algo is not perfect and need lots of iteration to be perfect.