Scraper sites ranking higher than my site for passages of my content.

[spica42]

Comparing 2012 to 2011, our traffic has dropped 20% from google. I didn't think much of it at first because I thought people were just searching less for these terms.

However, since July this year, we have lost a whopping 60% of traffic compared to last year.

As it is the peak period for us (in August and September) we didn't realize till now as the traffic looks similar month to month. The difference is only stark when we compared it to last year.

The last straw came when we did a search for passages on our site and realised that more than 30 other scraper sites rank higher on wholesaling our content that we spend hours writing. We did allow only one other site to use some of the content and that site is right on the first result.

How do we report all these scraper sites and how do we attempt to fix our traffic loss. Comparing our stats, we seem to suffer the most of a drop of traffic after July 24th.

[aristotle]

we did a search for passages on our site and realised that more than 30 other scraper sites rank higher on wholesaling our content that we spend hours writing

That's one of the effects of Penguin. Some pages on a penguinized site can still rank very high for their main keywords, yet be outranked by scrapers on searches for quoted snippets of text. Exactly why this happens isn't clear. One possibility that has occurred to me is that it is some kind of accidental "bug" in the Penguin part of the algorithm, but I don't have any way to know for sure. In any case, it's strange behavior.

[spica42]

The site in question is more than seven years old.

I found out (remembered) that I had started a test site two years back with tons of duplicate content for testing purposes.

I didn't configure the spider correctly so Google ended up crawling it. As there are lots of php errors on the site I, thought there is no way Google would give that site any authority. And to be sure, I even redirected all pages from the test site to the corresponding pages on my site in the end.

I found out today that that test site is actually ranking higher than our main site! To make things worse, there are also numerous other scalper sites that are ranking higher than my site too from phases on my site. WTF.

Why can't Google just use the date that it first index the content to determine which is the original source...? I don't understand but it's really disheartening.

[klark0]

From first hand experience, It's a symptom of sites affected by either Panda or Penguin (or both).

[spica42]

From first hand experience, It's a symptom of sites affected by either Panda or Penguin (or both).

Yup. I'm trying to find out which and trying to solve it as well. Heck, we may have been hit by the EMD as well. I'm starting by:

1) removing all the duplicates on my test site and other sites that I control.
2) If the content appears on sites i do not control, then I'll rewrite them. (That's more than 1000 pages)
3) For the EMD, I'll reduce the usage of some keywords.


What else should I do?

[crobb305]

Some pages on a penguinized site can still rank very high for their main keywords, yet be outranked by scrapers on searches for quoted snippets of text. Exactly why this happens isn't clear. One possibility that has occurred to me is that it is some kind of accidental "bug" in the Penguin part of the algorithm, but I don't have any way to know for sure. In any case, it's strange behavior.

This has been a very frustrating side effect of Panda and Penguin. I can publish a new piece, and within days (even hours sometimes), I am pushed to the supplemental body for exact snippets, despite hundreds of shares and new/natural links. I, too, wonder if it is a bug, but Google doesn't listen. We've been talking about this for months and they seem perfectly content/proud of where the index quality stands.