Seo Master present to you:
Are these why have your rankings dropped?
If you own or maintain a blog or website and have noticed a drop in rankings that has left you scratching your head as to why here is something you may want to consider.
Where are you getting your blog content from? Are they all written by you personally or are they being submitted to you? If they are being submitted to you do you Google paragraphs to see if they are copies scraped from elsewhere?
Most people have photos on their blogs. Are you taking the photos yourself or are your readers submitting photos they took themselves? Many bloggers and websites simply find photos from other places and reuse them. If that is the case for you are you certain they are public domain or are you using them without permission?
Interactive and multimedia sites and blogs certainly provide for a more engaging experience for the reader. MP3 plugins make it easy to add music to your site. Do you have rights to the music you are playing on it and permission to be using it on your personal site? If you are streaming YouTube or a similar service is it an authorized copy you are playing?
All of these things can be having a direct effect on your rankings with Google. As of August of 2012 Google began tracking the number of valid copyright removal notices that it receives for any site. The more notices it receives the lower it will drop you in the rankings.
Does anybody actually notice or report these infringements?
Yes- in a single 30 day period Google received 4.3 million URL’s noticed as being in violation of copyright laws. It no longer depends on a particular person going to see your website and reporting it. There are arrays of places that program bots to actively seek out content they hold the copyrights for and then automatically process the notification.
Every day now Google receives more of these notices then it did in the entire year of 2009. This new landscape is changing the way ratings work rewarding fresh and new and legal content and heavily penalizing those that use shortcuts or scraped and stolen content. If the content found on your site can be found in many other places simply having ‘more’ of it will not help and in fact may hurt.
What can you do?
- Write your own content or get it as original content written specifically for your blog.
- Use your photos or contact businesses or places you are writing about and request photos authorized for reuse.
- If adding music or video media ensure that it is from an authorized source and document your right to use it.
Google provides ‘counter notice’ tools. If your content is authorized and not in violation then use the Google tools to explain yourself and your position.It is better to answer and respond then to ignore it.
As of now Google will not close or remove content without a valid order to do so and makes no attempt to determine the validity of these reports as that is the responsibility of the copyright holder and the courts but they will change your rankings based on high numbers of these reports. 2013, By: Seo Master
