Reclaiming content accidentally dropped in site migration

[Solaron]

I recently moved a website from one host to another, along with a restructuring. Somewhere in the midst of this massive job, some important content was accidentally left out.

This content was a long article and I discovered just now that it was never moved to the new site a month ago. So, I was curious if it had been misplaced on another page and went to Google and searched for a block of text from the article and found out the the article has been copied (sometimes in whole and verbatum) by several other sites.

I was the author of the article, so I know it was posted for the first time on my domain. If I repost this content on my website on the page it was accidentally left off of, will I incure a duplicate content penalty on the back of those duplication at those other sites or will I recover my rightful place as the canonical source of that material?

Thanks in advance for any help/advise you can offer.

[Itanium]

I'd argue, that a 301 redirect from the old site to the new would make it okay for you to re-install the article.

However: You never know with Google. To be on the safe site, I'd rewrite it a little and add more content to it. There's always more you can say about a topic or change phrases and words.

[aakk9999]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Solaron!

Itanium gave you a good advice. You may also try to see when these sites copied your article.

It could be just as well that they copied it long before you moved the site, and if you were ranking for it before, it is likely you will rank again once you re-instate the article and implement 301 redirect.

So I would also head to wayback machine and try to see their copied page there, and look how far in the past the article existed on their sites.

[Solaron]

Hi Itanium and aakk9999, thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

Itanium: I have reinstalled the article. My domain was still listed for a search of that block of text but was on page two. I will edit the article in place and wait to see if Google responds positively. The thing is, the page has already suffered from the content being missing, so I really have nothing to lose by putting it back with a few edits. Maybe it will regain its positioning. Might make for a good test case.

aakk9999: Thank you for the welcome! I've known of WebmasterWorld and sought knowledge here for more than a decade. I am usually able to find an answer to an issue without needing to post but this issue I have now isn't something I've seen discussed before so I thought it might make for a good learning post.

The copied content had to have been copied before I moved the site because it hasn't been available in the new location until last night. I did check though and confirmed this. It was ranking very well so hopefully Google will maintain credit for the content to my domain.

Even though the article has been MIA for a month, will Google still have the original data on file for the former page that included the content in question?

If anyone else has any knowledge or comment about this situation, please chime in!

[RedBar]

and if you were ranking for it before, it is likely you will rank again once you re-instate the article and implement 301 redirect.

I would agree with this, recently Google seems to have been detecting the copiers/scrapers and ranking the original article back where it belonged.

I have no idea if this is with Panda/Penguin/whatever but I have also seen quite a lot of my images reinstalled back at #1.

Even though the article has been MIA for a month, will Google still have the original data on file for the former page that included the content in question?

Google's got a very, very long memory for this sort of stuff!

[Solaron]

Hi RedBar, thanks for your response. The sites that have my copied content all look to be scrapers, which I was hopeful would be in my favor. If Google hasn't forgotten where this content should be, I should be good to go. I will of course keep an eye on it and report back what happens.

Still would like to see others' thoughts on a situation like this.

[aakk9999]

Thank you on the response for welcome, Solaron.

When you edit the article and put it back to your site, I suggest you use "Fetch as Googlebot" in webmaster tools and once fetched, select "Submit to index". This may speed up a bit the process of indexing the article.

I would be interested to hear what are the results so please do come back to this thread to update us with the situation. It may take a few weeks for Google to process this or it may be as fast as 24 hours after doing the Fetch. Good luck!