Our Content Copied and Pages Now in 'Omitted Results'

[vetofunk]

For about 4 months now our site has been on a downward spiral in Google. I have been trying to figure out why.

Something I ran into in the past couple weeks is that a lot of newer sites have been copying a lot of our content. Actually just found one that took our content, navigation and structure of our site.

The thing that is scaring me is that when I search for individual phrases from our site, we are the one that Google puts in the omitted results, and the sites that copied our content are coming up in the search results. Our site is about 5 years old, but seems to be hit by something. Many of our pages have the grey bar, which is never good.

Any ideas why this happening? A penalty perhaps?

[tedster]

I'd roll up my sleeves and begin a "campaign" to get at least some of the copied content removed. Results may come more easily than you would think.

There's a good thread in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. Look for "Scraped/Stolen Content: What To Do First"