Help! My content is getting scraped AND outranking the original.

• I have a client who routinely publishes 100% unique content in the form of articles on their site. Unfortunately, they are a huge target of scraper sites and Google routinely ranks these reprinted articles above my client's original. Can you tell me why this may be happening and what we can do to combat it?

Answer: This is a frustrating problem that Google has tried to address, but it still pops up in practice. Google claims that it is good at identifying the original source of published content, but as you've seen with your own client site, this isn't always the case. Whether the scraper sites have more perceived authority or Google is having trouble finding the original version of the content first, the reasons for this practice are varied. Regardless, it's definitely something that should be prevented.

Rest assured that Google does not penalize webmasters for having their content scraped. It's not your fault that others are trying to take your content, and Google attempts to identify content as belonging to a certain site based on a number of factors. These factors are varied but discussed in detail in our article on duplicate content located here:

The SEO's Guide to Preventing Duplicate Content

For the sake of this question though, combating the practice will be our focus. In order to get your content linked with your site, and get your site seen as the authority, you need to make ownership of the content very clear from the search engine's perspective. Here are a few steps you can take to strengthen the bonds between your site and your content so that you get credit and the higher search engine ranking, even if the content itself is scraped.

First, you can beat the scrapers at their game by including several safeguards within your content that wi...