Architect Web Design

Report stolen content to Google

I recently discovered a website that had stolen the content from the website project I am working on. I found the duplicate content culprits using Google, I took this to mean Google had indexed their page and was not indexing mine due to the search engine seeing my content as being the duplicate.

This has been a real problem for me in my current role as Google Webmaster Tools is telling me that Google has indexed 2/116 URLs of the website. This is a big problem concerning SEO’s – I need to find out why Google isn’t indexing the pages and what to do about the stolen content.

After studying the website that copied the content, and the process needed to go through with Google in order to remove their page from the index I decided not to go through Google. It seemed to me that the process is a bit drawn out and involves correspondence with not only Google but the site containing the stolen content.

Here is the process to report stolen content to Google

Basically there is a copyright act for the internet called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This act protects content owners publishing content on the web – providing they publish the content first. You have to write to Google in the US declaring stolen content, then the website that stole your content, and somewhere along the line hopefully the matter is resolved.

I do not have the luxury of time, as of course we all know – time is money! So I decided not to contact Google in the US, as I am in the UK and the offending website is in Nigeria. I instead decided to re-write the pages they have copied. This new content should draw the search engines back to the website and have them index the pages.

Looks like the under-handed criminals have won this battle – but with my much more SEO text and less spelling mistakes in the new content, they will not win the war!

wayne Google domain, duplicate content, Google, index, internet marketing, search engines, seo, URL

Spaces in file names and how to 301 redirect

This was a problem that I came across the other day – the project I am working on had a lot of links pointing to old files that had been renamed and moved on the server. So how do you make use of these links and not have users clicking these links and landing on error pages?

How to use a 301 redirect to make use of broken links

If you are on a apache/linux server you can use the .htaccess file to redirect the broken links to their correct locations, here’s how:

redirect 301 /folder/file.html http://www.example.com/newfolder/newfile.html
redirect 301 /folder/ http://www.example.com/newfolder/

The first line is used in the .htaccess file to redirect a specific file to a new location. Simply type the location of the old file and then the full address (you must include the http://) of where the new file is located. Upload this to the root directory of your server. This will now redirect the old URL to the new URL you want. Put each redirect on a new line in the .htaccess file – you can have as many lines as you need.

The second line in the example will redirect an entire folder to a new folder location, using the same method. Using a 301 redirect is the most search engine optimised way to redirect URL’s like this. Also it can make use of links you weren’t benefitting from before.

How to 301 redirect with %20 spaces

This problem has me frustrated but fortunately there is a simple solution. The site I am working on has some files which have spaces in the file names e.g. file name.html
Here is the 301 redirect solution:

redirect 301 “oldfolder/file name.html” http://www.example.com/newfolder/file%20name.html

Yes simply add quotes to the first part of the redirect! Make sure you use spaces though, and only have the quotes round the first part. The reason I kept the %20 (the HTTP code for a space in the URL) in the redirect part of the file name was because I was not renaming the pages just yet – I wanted to keep the same pages at the same positions in the search engines.

This version is for linux/apache hosting only, if you wish to do a 301 redirect on a windows server use IIS.

Remember when making pages for your website do not use spaces in the filenames!

wayne SEO Tips domain, free seo tips, URL