When you are publishing content online, there is a chance that others can copy it and publish it on their website.

Many of them do this out of ignorance, but ultimately it’s you who has to pay the price.

• You will lose traffic and ranking.

Google is getting smarter in finding pages which are duplicating your content, but not every time.

Sometimes, when others copy stuff from your blog, their copied web page is ranking higher than your original content.

While I was working on my website to recover from Google Panda, I realized that post duplication was a major reason for my site’s penalty.

If your content is also being copied by others, this tutorial will educate you on how you can report such pages to Google.

Once you report these copied pages, Google will remove it from its web-index and your original ranking will be restored. If you are reporting content that’s on the BlogSpot/Blogger platform, Google will flat out delete this duplicate content.

In my experience, they take around 2-10 days to process your request.

(Note: While Google has the power to delete BlogSpot/Blogger blogs, for self-hosted WordPress blogs, you can only report to remove it from Google’s web search. To delete that blog completely, you need to send a DMCA notice to the web-host of that site.)

Find copied content from your blog:

There are many services like Grammarly and Copyscape which you can use to find copied content from your blog. Or you can simply pick up a line from your blog post and do a Google search with quotes around it.

Here’s an example:

Go into Google and search for (with quotes)-

• “Or you can simply pick up a line from your blog post and do a Google search with quotes around it”

Report copied content to Google:

So once you have identified your copied content, go to the Google DMCA page and select  submit a legal request.

“Web Search” (or “Blogger” if appropriate).

In this case, I’m selecting “web-search” as an example because the content is copied by Bloggers on various platform like self hosted WordPress and a few forums.

Now, select the rest of the options as appropriate in your case.

On the next page select these options:

• Google Products: Blogger/BlogSpot
• Reason: I have found content that may violate my copyright.
• Copyright: Yes, I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
• Work in question: Other.

After selecting this, it will give you a link to “this form” which will take you to a page where you can report those pages from the BlogSpot blog that is copying your content.

Note: If the copying website is not BlogSpot, you should select “Web Search” as the first option.

Here are the direct links for the different forms:

• For BlogSpot blog copying your content: Use this form
• Other platform copying your content: Use this form
• WordPress.com blog copying your content: Use this form
• For LinkedIn: Use this link

Now fill out the form and report all of the links. You can use a single form to report multiple links.

Before submitting, re-check your request.

It may be a little time consuming to re-check everything, but this works the best. Within a couple of days you will get rid of all such copied content and you will get back all of your stolen traffic.

• If those blogs (auto-RSS content generated blogs) are using AdSense on their pages, follow this link and report it to the Google AdSense team for a violation of copyright. This will cost the spammer the use of their AdSense account.

So far, I have removed hundred of links in the last couple of days and I can see my lost traffic coming back to my blog (especially for those keywords which were stolen by such copy-paste bloggers).

Earlier, I never bothered about reporting such posts to Google, but now it’s always a good idea to report all such copied content to Google.

Do let us know if you are in the habit of reporting such copied content to Google in the comments below. How has it helped your traffic?