Finding duplicate content

Copyscape has an API.

Google short snippets (say 15-20 words) in speechmarks and see what you find.

Have the writer re-write the articles?

Something like this situation, I'd use a paid tool for, like Raven or Screaming Frog.

Thanks for the replies.

I've used Copyscape on each page and they all pass OK. The previous pages I found with snippets of borrowed info I either removed or rewrote. I also removed any quotes just to be sure.

I've googled hundreds of snippets from random pages and cannot find any copied content.

Netmeg, I have screaming frog and am aware how to find internal dup content, but not sure how to use it to find external?

The website is 2.5 months old. We publish 4-5 articles per week and they average 2-3k words per article, the articles are written by professionals with 25+ years experience in the field. Each article is shared well via social media and our Facebook page already has 10,000 followers.

But Google is acting as though we don't exist. Maybe this is more of a sandboxing period vs a penalty?

I'd double check there are no spidering issues i.e. barriers of entry to your content. robots.txt, potential hacks, quirk in markup etc.

I've ran Screaming frog a few times. It appears to pick up all of the pages, nothing out of the ordinary. Google has also indexed 100% of the content too.

I somehow don't think duplicate content is your issue, but maybe.

How much of your content (percentage wise) is this one duplicating writer responsible for?

Probably 10-20% of the articles had chunks of duplicate content in them. The other articles all appear to be fine. Even those with duplicate content, also had more original content vs duplicate.

I haven't personally experienced the sandbox effect for a long time. But after this experience, I googled it and found a fair bit of recent chatter about it.

We haven't actively built any links, which may also be part of the issue. I didn't want for our brand new website to be under the radar for unnatural link building patterns. But we've picked up a few along the way.

Well it's a pretty new site. Things don't just pop to the top anymore unless they're something really unusual, newsworthy or viral. I think you just have to be patient and build your way up.

Yeah, it could well be an age thing. I didn't expect instant success. But I didn't expect 6 visitors from the volume of articles we have and the amount of attention we get elsewhere.

One thing that's been crossing my mind all too often is the hosting. It's hosted with a website that contains lots if thin content (largely image based). I wonder if that could effect it? Because it's only 2 sites on the dedicated server, it's clear own them both.

Is it worth switching to it's own server, even to eliminate the possibility? Or a little too much hit and hope?