Google Gives Advice On When Copy Sites Outrank Your Original Content

Danny Sullivan from Google provided some advice and took some feedback on a specific example of when an original piece of research from a website was being outranked by a site copying its information.

This specific example is for the query [r kelly net worth] where the original source of the information supposedly comes from celebritynetworth.com but according to Celebrity Net Worth, the site ranking above them for that query is a “content regurgitators.” Celebrity Net Worth said the change happened with the September core update and they asked what can be done.

Here are those tweets:

@searchliaison We obviously don’t know all the mechanics of a core update, but it does seem that the Sept update shifted a bunch of content regurgitators to outrank CNW by simply writing summary articles of our original info. “r kelly net worth” is a good example.

— Celebrity Net Worth (@celebnetworth) October 3, 2022

Very hopeful this is a bug or if there’s something off with our site that we can address?

— Celebrity Net Worth (@celebnetworth) October 3, 2022

Danny Sullivan of Google replied giving a few bits of advice including (1) ask the sites taking your original research to cite and link to your content, (2) make it clear on your page that the original research is yours and yours alone, (3) ensure the details on the page show it is uniquely done, (4) and explain how you get to your original research. This is not to say that this site did anything wrong, Danny said he will pass along this information to the Google Search team.

Here are those tweets:

I think, and this is advice for anyone too, that if you generate unique figures, it might help to make it clear that the figures are from you and unique to you. For example, wow, negative two million! And I’m like where’s that coming from?….

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 4, 2022

So maybe adding more to that type of box and elsewhere with advice on how to cite the figures, requesting that people consider linking to you as the source, might help. And for those you know probably know better, I’d reach out to them if you haven’t already.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 4, 2022

Previously, Google has said that when scrapers outrank you, it might be due to quality issues with your site or your site was penalized. This is why you often see complaints about this after a core algorithm, which accesses site quality.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: More here:

To be clear, I talked about original research being used without a citation. That’s entirely different from an entire article being duplicated within permission and where DMCA is an option anyone can use.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 4, 2022

When I looked, it wasn’t the case of the original article being exactly duplicated. Original research sometimes being outranked by others reporting on it also isn’t new to this last update. It can happen say when newspapers report on research but fail to link to research reports.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 4, 2022