Search For Domain + Keyword Brings No Results

[linkbuildr]

We recently had a site have a large portion of the sites content copied by a few sites. All of our content is now showing up under omitted results when I search for it in "". This all started on the 9th of Feb. One of the sites that copied us is the .ca version and copied our site structure as well as even a slight variation of the logo.

- site:mydomainname returns over 360 pages indexed and in my WMT it's showing the same number of pages indexed

- inurl:mydomainname doesn't bring up our site at all, just where we have links and mentions

- if I do a search like mydomainname.com keyword nothing from our site shows up in the results

- No warnings in WMT at all

- backlinking done over the past few months has been from a few directories, 2 infographics going all over and 2 press releases.

I'm thinking we got spanked for dupe content even though it's ours....currently filing and DMCA with Google. The content that was copied isn't the greatest but it isn't that bad either. 75% of the sites ranking for our keywords are full of dupe content and spammed links.

I thought it might be some link devaluation/filtering and that's possible, but the pages that got copied are completely gone.

[goodroi]

I would not rely too much on those Google searches. Google is notorious for not returning reliable data when doing those special searches. You might want to look at your analytics to see if traffic has actually gone down. If it has gone down, analytics can tell you which specific pages lost traffic so you can focus on them first.

There might be several issues but start with the basics - making sure you have unique & relevant content. If someone is infringing on your copyright you need to defend your site.

Generally I would start with a nice email request before using a DMCA requests.

I would also make sure to use canonical tags and absolute links since some lazy webmasters don't bother removing these items when they steal your content. Going forward when you publish new content make sure you get links to it so Google will crawl it on your site first, before it is republished elsewhere.

When appropriate it might make sense to offer free content to the copyright infringers. I have come across fortune 500 sites that stole my copyright because some intern was lazy. For those rare situations I've paid a writer to create an original article and in return I earned a permanent backlink from a quality relevant site that drove traffic.

As for your link development, I have doubts that you are gaining backlinks with any power. Most directories and press release websites do not significantly help rankings. You can test this by pointing your links at one of your pages and seeing how much (or how little) ranking change there is.

[linkbuildr]

- site is getting 2-5 visits from Google organic search, down from 300-400/day

- content was unique and very relevant

- setting up DMCA, copyscape and rel=author

- the site already had about 350 natural and quality links before doing the aforementioned link building which brought in a couple hundred more

- this site was ranking in the top 5 for all its major keywords

[Planet13]

I have to ask, how authoritative was the other site (the one that copied your content).

Was it just an MFA site? Or was it an otherwise legitimate site that copied your content (I know that LEGITIMATE sites don't steal content, but just play along with me for now).

[linkbuildr]

It's a pretty legitimate looking site...they have a lot of well done unique content elsewhere and their link profile is ok. If I search for mydomain.com keyword their .ca shows up instead there as the first listing.

[JCKline]

Sounds like you got penalized by Google, when it should have been them.

[linkbuildr]

I'm pretty sure they think it's "our Canadian version" due to the url structure being the same as well as the logo and all that jazz...