Copied piece of content steals answer box

[njuzor]

Hey guys!

I was hoping you could give me some insight on the matter. I had the answer box for a long time and just yesterday a competitor took it from me. I'll give you an example.

My text: How to build a sandcastle? Building a sandcastle can mean a lot of work, but it shouldn't. Here are the steps to build a great sandcastle: ...

His/her text: How to build a sandcastle? Building a sandcastle can be a challenge, but don't let it be. Here are the steps to build a great sandcastle: ...

It's almost entirely copied, with a different choice of words in one sentence. What does this mean? Is Google just testing? What could be done about it?

Thanks!

[aristotle]

This happened to one of my sites about six months ago. My page lost the answer box but is still number 1 in the main search results. But for whatever reason, it still gets about the same amount of google traffic as it did before.

[njuzor]

Thanks for the reply @aristotle. It's exactly the same with me, I'm still ranked on the first place, although I'm losing approx 1,5k traffic a day because of it. :(

Heaps of weird things are happening right now. I think Google has released a broken A.I. as penguin 4.0. Penguin was the thing to clean out PBN's and spammy link profiles, but I know for sure of a couple of obvious PBN's haven't even been slightly penalized.

[jambam]

Oh i see tons of amazon affiliate spam review sites in answer boxes and littering the front pages now... even without big links profiles.

[njuzor]

You've been starting to see this after P 4.0? @jambam - It feels like SEO is back to where it was in 2007ish.

[jambam]

Yep my niche is major broken at the moment and spam amazon affilaite sites are even appearing in the answer box. All it takes is to now a very focused new site with 1000-2000 word articles about the top.. or best whatever without ever even used the item in your life and then you can rank.. that is what one person is doing in my niche and has 4 sites on page 1 all talking about the same exact products with useless cookie cutter content with sentences like:

"there are many different places to buy blahaha you can go to the shops to buy blahaha but some people go to a website called amazon who sell blahaha"

so im guessing there arent any filter on at the moment so these spam sites will be able to take your content and rank for it.

[njuzor]

So I guess we'll just have to hope for the best and wait it out.

[westcoast]

Our niche is broken too. A new site (last 2 yrs) with nearly no content, no back links, and nothing even remotely interesting other than the fact than its domain name is KEYWORD.xyz is dominating most queries and variations in our niche, pushing out sites with orders of magnitude better links and content. It has been that way for 3 months now. It's completely ridiculous.