We are a leading publisher of how-to marketing information with over 380,000 subscribers, and approx. 1mil pageviews/month. Our site is content rich, SEO'd, we have hundreds of thousands of back links and we've been very well indexed for years (new pages are usually indexed within 15 min). Businessweek, and some others, actually solicit membership for our content.
On Nov. 17th 2010 our Google site traffic dropped by over 60% and has not rebounded.
I've also noticed that our indexed pages, including home page, have fallen farther back in search results dramatically (typically fixed to top position on page #2 in results, if listed at all) for some of the regular searches I do to check results. I've seen some opinions on the possible causes, ranging from Holiday SERPs, Google Preview/Instant, other algorithm changes, etc., however, these are all guesses. I don't believe we are violating any Google policies.
A couple of things I've noticed:
1. Our content is scraped daily, either in full format or excerpt, and these feed-based sites are ranking better than us, the source, only after Nov 17th. We normally ranked #1 for our content, however, something changed, and we are now often demoted to page 2 or not shown at all, despite being the source.
Our content still gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, however, searches for our exact content titles show sites that are pulling our feeds or scraping our content, instead of showing us.
We used to be listed #1 for content title searches, or anything closely related, and now we are farther back in search results if at all, superseded by feed based sites. And all our keyword searches have dropped, along with traffic.
Some searches result in the Google message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."
Scraper sites are listed for this content, and they scraped it from our site in full. If you click the "show more" link it then shows our site. This also leads me to believe that Google has lowered the rank of our site pages, for some reason, as we are now thought of as the duplicate site.
Many, many sites illegally scrape our content, and we can't track them all down. Most of these sites are completely bogus and just used for Adsense or advertising purposes.
How in the world does this happen? How can't Google determine source site and site quality. Site that are ranking are simply scraped/feed-based sites, and we've been a top online marketing publisher for over 10 years.
I sought feedback on Google Webmaster Forums, but am hoping to get additional input here.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
