Word-for-word copies of my articles massively outranking the original. What can I do?

[ToSlim]

Hey Warriors,

So I'm having this problem a great deal. I write articles which often "go viral" as they say and get copied to hundreds and sometimes thousands of websites across the internet.

Unfortunately, this leads to my articles being outranked by copies, even though mine was published and indexed before all of the rest.

With exact title match searches, sometimes my original article will be buried way back on page 5 or even further down.

Why is this happening? What can I do to stop it? It's killing what could be a lot of traffic for me through the search engines.

The problem is that I appreciate people posting my work as it gives me notoriety and has resulted in my name becoming somewhat "known" but I would like all of that search engine traffic as well.

Anyone have any ideas? I've started making the sites that syndicate my work put a link back to the original article in the body of every article of mine they post but it doesn't seem to be making a bit of difference.

My site is pretty well SEO'd with PR4 after less than 9 months online and well over 220k links in Google Webmaster Tools, if that makes a difference at all.

Thanks for your help.

[outwest]

you have 220k backlinks? wow

[ToSlim]

Originally Posted by outwest

you have 220k backlinks? wow

That's just in the webmaster tools though, if I do a manual search through Google it turns up a smaller number for some reason.

But yeah my site has grown very popular and the links are shared around and I always include a link to at least one previous article in my work so I get a backlink every time someone posts a copy of it so long as they keep the links intact.

[outwest]

How did you get so many backlinks. What position did that get you ? was that kws very competitive or high traffic?

[ToSlim]

Originally Posted by outwest

How did you get so many backlinks. What position did that get you ? was that kws very competitive or high traffic?

I explained it in the above post. I write articles that people find useful and informative so they share them a ton and it gets me backlinks. Currently I'm on the front page for two competitive and relatively high traffic keywords. Right now I'm #4 for one keyword and #9 for another.

[Barry Unruh]

ToSlim, I don't think there is a lot you can do today. You must make sure the content is indexed on your site first to help.

Google is looking into using the REL=Author tag and a couple other metatags for "original source" to use for these purposes in the future, but nothing is active at this point.

Here are a couple references you might find interesting:

Source Attribution meta tags: solving news syndication duplicate content issues? | Search News Central

rel="author" is Same-Site Only

I'm sure other people here on the WF know a lot more about this than me, so watch for different opinions.

[ToSlim]

Originally Posted by Barry Unruh

ToSlim, I don't think there is a lot you can do today. You must make sure the content is indexed on your site first to help.

Google is looking into using the REL=Author tag and a couple other metatags for "original source" to use for these purposes in the future, but nothing is active at this point.

Here are a couple references you might find interesting:

I'm sure other people here on the WF know a lot more about this than me, so watch for different opinions.

Interesting, I really hope they do implement something like that and I always do make sure my articles are indexed first. They always indexed hours before anything else, it is truly confusing that they would be outranking me. I wish Google would do something to ameliorate this problem.

[kissofdeath]

Hi, are you using google webmaster tools?

if so you can claim ownership of the articles more info here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

From how it reads if you set your self as the original author Google will see all others as copies and rank you higher, if your writing these articles first you should have no problems verifying your pages as your content before anyone else does

i noticed they have a new section (or a section i've never noticed before)
if you go into the labs menu to the left, and author stats, which will show you traffic coming in this way