How does Google Treat Dupe Content

[Nicky]

One of our sites was dropped from Googles index just before Christmas. I've been looking for reasons as to why this happened. Yesterday I found a website which has basically copied word for word the content on all of our pages. (Very frustrating and very annoying). I now realise this must have happened around 6-8 months ago, that site is now ranking on our content and we are out of the index. Their site was created in 1999 and ours in 2001, therefore, their domain name is older than ours. They have copied our content, yet we are dropped and they remain, is this because Google believe their content is more original than ours because their domain name is older than ours?

What can we do to rectify this situation? I can't say 100% this is the reason why we were dropped as I dont know Google's mind, but, we also have 2 forums on this site, one for an "Ask the Expert" section, and one a general open discussion forum, both on the same domain, which have not been affected and still in Googles index.

The site is informational only on debt.

Any help on this, as you can imagine, will be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Chris_D]

Hi Nicky

These should help:

1. www.copyscape.com - to identify dupe content

2. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php - to work out whose page was live first.

Once you find everyone who has stolen your content - then ascertain that your content was 'first'.

Then you have several options - including:
- sending 'Dear robbing b#$%^&*d who stole my content' emails to the offending site's contacts/Whois contacts; or
- heading down the http://www.google.com/dmca.html route....

[Nicky]

Hi Chris - Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I used those sites to find out which pages they had robbed, it was pretty clear anyway, they didnt even bother to change the layout! Archive.org makes it clear the original content came from us.

Aparantly we can't use DMCA procedures because it is American only. :rolleyes:

Its just the fact that I'd like to know if our site was penalised because they copied our content and Google thought it was theirs first because of the age of the domain.

[David Wallace]

If they stole your copy, get a lawyer and release them on the content stealing thief! You can also report the theft to the culprit’s ISP – maybe the ISP will take the site down. We were recently successful at getting this accomplished with someone that had stolen our sales copy.