Duplicate Content Credit Always Goes to Domain With More Authority?

[JoeHouse]

Hello everyone

This is very interesting and I came across this problem once before and I believe it may have happened again.

A few years back I had a website selling bluewidgets. I had approximately 3500 items for sale. To increase sales I signed up with a very popular online company in which I would pay 8% commissions on each sale I made on their site.

The problem was that this site would crawl all my inventory from my website and post the identitcal item descriptions for each item on their site that exactly match my item's content description.

Because the other company was the authority domain within a month I lost all my rankings on my domain and this company which borrowed all my descriptions to place on their site was ranking well for all my item descrtiptions.

There was obviously a duplicate content penalty imposed on my site. Soon after I decided to remove all my listings from this popular retail site and within two weeks all my rankings came back.

Now I have what I believe to be a very similar problem this time with ezine articles.

We have an on staff writer who once a week will write articles for a very popular ezine article directory.

Twice in the last month this ezine directory removed all our resource links from the articles and we could not figure out why.

When I looked into this deeper I noticed that our writer was using a paragraph or two (word for word) from our own website and using this as part of the ezine article.

When I ran copy scape on our domain urls, many of the ezine articles were showing the duplicate content that our writer wrote.

The question is, do you believe this is the reason why ezine articles removed our resource links?

Also would this infraction be sever enough to cause a duplicate content penalty?

Finally because this ezine article website is considered the authority domain do you think we lost our rankings in favor of these ezine articles in which we are the originators of?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

[indyank]

yes you need to be careful with articles directory and the e-hows these days as they do such things to rank well and they are building massive links to good pages as well.

[indyank]

with google's current algorithm too skewed in favour of ehow, ezine and wikipedia, I even feel that it may no longer be wise to build links through these sites.

[JoeHouse]

The strange thing is they removed all our links twice within a month. I asked why but have not gotten an answer. We played by all their rules in regards to density, amount of links in the resource box etc..but they keep removing them.

I know this particular ezine directory is very close to Google. Is it possible Google notified them of our penalty and ezine has removed our links upon Google's request?

[Planet13]

Is it possible Google notified them of our penalty and ezine has removed our links upon Google's request?

I don't think google notifies anybody about anything. I think that getting any actionable information from google would be extremely difficult (except for, say, a malware warning in your webmaster tools account or some such).

If that ezine directory dropped the links to your site, then I would suggest submitting to a different ezine directory, to be honest.

[bwnbwn]

JoeHouse were the articles posted and then they came back and removed the links latter?

[JoeHouse]

Yes that's exactly what happened. The articles were all posted with two links in the resource box. Then weeks later I would go back and check them only to find they have removed all the links intensionally.

They did this twice in the last month. I couldn't figure out why they would do this because we are going by all their guidelines, so I wrote them and asked why but they never got back to me.

My best guess is that they have a connection with google and if a site is penalized they remove the links from the articles.

I have written articles on this same directory for other websites and they have never ever touched the links on articles intended for my other sites.

Only this one website which is currently under penalty. There's got to be some kind of connection, wouldn't you think?

Maybe there is some unwritten agreement between this popular article directory and Google to remove links for two reasons:

1) Sites under penalty
2) To prevent websites from climbing the ranking too fast

Not really sure but this is my best guess.

[1script]

A few years back I had a website selling bluewidgets. I had approximately 3500 items for sale. To increase sales I signed up with a very popular online company in which I would pay 8% commissions on each sale I made on their site.

The problem was that this site would crawl all my inventory from my website and post the identitcal item descriptions for each item on their site that exactly match my item's content description.

I am just curious as to why you did not choose to simply running ALL your business through them? It might have been a perfect example of "parasitic hosting" done legitimately (so I guess, the proper name would have been "symbiotic hosting" then ...)
What I mean is that you only pay 8% but they are an authority site that will probably rank easier and higher for anything with less effort. They rank higher than you on "bluewidget" but what difference does it make if you still get 92% of the proceeds when they sell it? I guess, it's a fine line to walk and your blue widgets are better be pretty unique to you so they cannot simply take business elsewhere but in a right situation I think this could have worked to your advantage.

I'm considering a similar setup and the "popular online company" would be Amazon so I really need to carefully think it through and so I'm very interested to learn what the objections were (from the sales perspective) in your case.

[dstiles]

JoeHouse - you say ezine removed your links. This is possible if they cannot verify your pages. They send around a bot to check and sometimes use a browser as well.

There is a manual check via a proxy at 66.180.162.210 and a bot at 216.235.79.56. Manual check is just a browser - Firefox I think but can't be certain now. I check the bot UA with the phrase "EzineArticles.com Link Scanner" (without quotes).

[leadegroot]

My best guess is that they have a connection with google and if a site is penalized they remove the links from the articles.

I think the probability of 'google having a connection' with some article publishing site is... well.. zero.
More likely, I think, is that your article exceeded some quality parameter internal to the article site and they removed the links to conserve the link juice to their own site.
Cynical, I know, but thats the selfish way the modern web seems to be :(