[deviltronics]

Right guys, here is a situation.

I put a monthly competition up on my blog in March, the content was unique.

Here: http://www.deviltronics.com/blog/monthly-competitions/

I then sent a newsletter out that also included details of the competition. A reader decided to copy the whole content from the blog and stick it on money saving expert. This almost happened straightaway, probably a day after the content was put on my blog site.

Here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/....html?t=795609

As my blog is 'teeny-weeny' compared to moneysavingexpert.com in the big G world, google must have crawled the latter first. So when it came round to crawling my blog site it must have taken it as duplicate content and not ranked me for anything on that page.

Doing a keyword search on google shows the thread on MSE in the SERPs, but not my page.

I have done a cache in google and it shows the blog page has definetly been crawled. I have also got a unique sentence from the content and put it in quotations and searched it, only the MSE thread comes up. When I click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" just under the single result my page appears.So big G has clearly taken this as duplicate content even though I created the bugger.

Anyways I can fix this and tell google it's mine?

[LinkingClever]

You can't as far as I know. May be worth getting on to MSE and asking for them to pull it, but better would be get a back link from them
Jay

[awebapart]

Having your original content trumped by another site's copy of your content getting indexed first is a real pain. If it is important content, the best way to avoid this happening is don't shout about it until it has been indexed first, place a very subtle link to the page from your homepage or a regularly indexed site.

This issue is one of the reasons why google changed their original statement of:

"There's nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking"

to

"There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking"

because there are things other people can do to affect your ranking, and that is why I take a lot of things that google says with a pinch of salt.

For forums copying content, you need to make it clear that your content should not be copied, for example look at the copyright notice at the bottom of my site's recent web design width article. If copying does happen then get in contact with the forum admin, failing that report the site to their hosting company (most hosting T&Cs state that clients are not allowed to have material on their site which they do not own copyright, license or permission for).

In the case of a competitor doing it, report the competitor to google too.