Case Highlights -
1. A site runs smoothly for over a year with good ranks in Google.
2. Someone copies the content of a page and posts it on many high traffic/high PR portals such as free classifieds and review sites.
3. Ranks for that page drop in Google, while ranks for other pages remain.
4. We contact those portals individually and ask them to remove the content, which they do.
5. Ranks for this page comes back within a week.
At the time, I did think it might just be a coincidence, after all my site had that content before other portals copied it. But, I wasn't as much confident as before.
A new case -
1. I am asked to review a site, that in spite of being an authority in its space, ranks very low, while ranks in Yahoo/Bing consistently in the first page for majority of keywords.
2. I check to see if its content was copied, since I find nothing else wrong. Yes, in fact it has given its content to many major/high PR review portals and content aggregators. Many of the ranks in the first page refer to this site, while this site itself ranks in 100s and 200s.
Now, having been through a similar experience, I tend to think this site is a victim of copied content (not plagiarism) and it is practically impossible to get other sites to remove content since there are hundreds of them. Rewriting seems to be the only option, but a tedious one, since there are hundreds of pages.
My 2 questions are -
1. Do you think it just can't happen, since Google says there is almost nothing one can do to harm your ranks. Has that "almost" given them enough room to excuse themselves out of a pretty nasty situation?
2. Should this website go the length of rewriting their entire content or is there a easier way out?
Tank you
