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Our business is heavily dependent on SEO traffic from long tail search. We have over 400,000 pieces of content, all of which we found scraped and published by another site based out of Hong Kong (we're in the US).

Google has a process for DMCA takedown, but doing so would be beyond tedious for such a large set of urls. The scraped content is outranking us in many searches and we've noticed a drastic decrease in organic traffic, likely from a duplicate content penalty.

Has anyone dealt with an issue like this? I can't seem to find much help online.

Hi, thanks for your response (although the screenshots aren't appearing...).

I'm going to have to disagree with you regarding the May "hit". We're a very seasonal business with the majority of our clients being college students. We see a big drop in our traffic, and general organic hits, after May and throughout the summer. That's simply part of our business cycle.

We're currently in our busy season until about Christmas break. The drop in traffic we're seeing right now is not natural. Yesterday's organic visits were one-third what they normally are on a typical Sunday. It seems to be getting worse.

Furthermore, our site is not that young. We've been around for 3+ years, so I don't think this is a factor right now. Like I said, we were ranking for many of these keywords, often times in the top three spots; now we're nowhere to be found.

I have a feeling this has something to do with our backlinks, but I really don't have the expertise to know for sure.

Our site is: www.kibin.com

Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow.

We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as:

• kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay
• kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper
• kibin.com/s/paper-revision

We no longer rank for these keywords... at all.

My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog

If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile.

Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out.

Thanks!

Thanks, Mike... that's what I figured: probably spammy but _might_be legit. They're pretty old-school, but they do have a social presence and some (pretty terrible) content.

Being familiar with them from simply being involved in the industry and my own due diligence, I'm almost 100% certain this has got to be black hat.

Any thoughts on the traffic data? Take a look at their compete data... that's a pretty huge drop back in May-June 2012. I'm wondering if it was due to them getting hit by a Google update for doing the same thing that they are (most likely) doing now.

DVEbgWR

One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to?

They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related?

Wh10b97

Charles,

Thanks for the kudos on the site design. We've spent the better half of January sprucing it up with bread crumbs, service pages, a new layout, the custom illustrations, etc.

The goal was to increase user experience while also improving the SEO friendliness of the site. It was a lot of (positive) change and that's why I'm excited to start seeing some results and fruits of our labor!

I didn't know that you could submit a url to WMT... in fact, we haven't been using WMT very much at all. I just poked around and found out how to do that, so that's done. Thanks!

As for backlinks, we did get a fair number of quality ones (and one coming early this week from eHarmony's blog yet too)... so I guess I'll just have to be patient for that to show up in OSE. We're still a pretty new SEOMoz account, so I'm just a bit antsy to start seeing some of our metrics improve.

I guess I just need to be a bit patient

Thanks for the response!

Hi all,

We just kicked off our first infographic to start a content marketing strategy:

I'm wondering how long it will take for SEOMoz to add this to our link profile, and I suppose more importantly, how long it will take Google to recognize the links that have been generated from it.

The response has been pretty good and I'm excited to see the results.

Thanks!

Thanks donford, that's very helpful.

After thinking it over, I feel it's best to keep the urls as simple as possible and use something like /s/essay-editing for them (the 's' representing services).

Thanks!

We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows:

Services

• Student Services
• Essay editing
• Essay revision
• Author Services
• Book editing
• Manuscript critique

We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing?

I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO.

Any advice on this is much appreciated.

Cool, thanks Andrea. Glad it's not just me...

So, I was perusing SEOMoz's suggested link directory list and noticed some sites there require paid links. I have a couple questions regarding this:

Is paying for directory listings a good idea? I'm not crazy enough to buy a bunch of links; I want to create a sustainable SEO strategy. But I do know that most everyone does at least a little paid linking.  Is there a budget or percentage of ones total links you would recommend for this?  Is it REALLY ok to do this at all?

Also, assuming I have about $200-$500/month I could spend purchasing links, what sites are best to get links for first?

Just  a bit of background: we're starting a content marketing strategy for our business and are spending about $2,000 per month "buying" content (design, data, writing, etc.) so purchasing links is definitely NOT our strategy and never will be.

Thanks!

Thanks donford, that's very helpful.

After thinking it over, I feel it's best to keep the urls as simple as possible and use something like /s/essay-editing for them (the 's' representing services).

Thanks!