Google’s problem in telling the plagiarist from the victim

We have a client, Peck Family Dentistry, with whom we have been working for several months. We revamped their website, gave them some great content, and took care of all the little SEO details that would help them rank. But with all we did, we couldn’t get his website up past page 10 in Google for its primary search term. And then earlier this month, after the Penguin 2.0 update, it disappeared from the rankings altogether for this search term and inexplicably dropped for rankings for what we call secondary search terms.

After scouring the site for errors that could be causing Google penalties and finding none, I had a hunch to check for the duplicate content penalty. Sure enough, someone had copied their home page, word-for-word, and the content was posted on four other websites.

In a just world, the sites that copied the content would be penalized. The problem is, Google hasn’t been very good at distinguishing between the site that did the copying and the site that is being copied from. In this case, they were crediting one of the copying sites with being the originator of the content. I could tell this by seeing that this other site was ranking for the content while our client wasn’t.

The best remedy for a simple copying situation like this, where the client’s site hasn’t been banned, is to simply re-write that content, which is what we did. Meanwhile, the community of SEO professionals is waiting for Google to figure out how to fix this problem. Google, to their credit, has acknowledged the problem, but we’re getting impatient for them to fix this. Maybe the authorship tag will help them identify content originators.

Our flagship website, mynewsmile.com, has been seriously impacted by this issue. It was first launched in 1995 and has been a content pioneer that has been recognized around the world for helpful, original, and highly interesting content. But fascination with its content has led many websites to copy it. I checked this morning for copied content from its home page. One of the first sections on the home page is a paragraph defining cosmetic dentistry. This paragraph has been copied over 4500 times. And Google appears to have credited one of the copiers as being the originator of the content.

Farther down the page is an addition that came to me as a brainstorm maybe three years ago, where I was able to obtain photographs from one of the master cosmetic dentists in the country of a case where an excellent dentist had done crowns on the front teeth of a patient and thought they were beautiful but the patient disagreed. This excellent cosmetic dentist had re-done the work with a beautiful, sparkling result. What better way, I thought, to illustrate the difference between a dentist who thinks he or she can deliver beautiful cosmetic dentistry and one who actually delivers it. The text and photographs have now been copied 190 times. I checked the site Google appears to be crediting with originating the content, a site called cosmeticdentistsofaustralia.com where they have a page LVICosmeticSpecialists.php. They have lifted not only the photographs of this case, but four of our other cases.

And Google is penalizing US for this copyright infringement. We just wrote them this morning through their Webmaster Tools help section asking them to give mynewsmile.com the credit for being the great originator it has been over the years. We’ll see if they heed it.

Maddening.