Google has put a manual action on https://howtodiscuss.com/
Even though our site has lot of unique content and lot of high quality useful content on many topics. I think discourse is not SEO optimized.
H1 tag is missing on homepage of all discourse sites, please add that.
And there are many more SEO issues too and discourse is not very good for Onpage SEO optimization.
Also, can anyone help us remove this Google penalty from our site? We are happy to pay for this work.
The error/issue doesn’t seem to be related to the software part of discourse.
From my expirenece with SEO/Google search console, I can tell you that this is probably realted if you have redundant categories/tags.
For example may be you have categorey A, B:, and you have topics 1,2,3. Where topics 1,2 and 3 belongs to category A and B. This would lead to that category A page is identical to that of category B. Thus Google index would see redundant page.
What I said also can apply to tags, or any property that can lead to the creation of a page.
So of the top of my head I would say, ensure that you don’t have duplicate content by being catious with the usage of tags/categories.
A practical example from your site:
https://howtodiscuss.com/tag/query Topics tagged query
https://howtodiscuss.com/tag/queries Topics tagged queries
Those two pages return identical content which is not so good for SEO and is related the issue raised above.
If you would want more in depth analysis of your site, or/and developing a functionality that can automicatlly mititgate that, I am happy to be counsltned. DM me or reach out at mailto:ghassan@zaat.dev.
Okay, I have reached you out. Also have lot of duplicate about pages e.g
Also, if you can give me a list of all pages URLs with low word count, duplicate content and plagiarised content, it will be great and we can take a bulk action on all of them.
Waiting for your response so we can get started together on this. I sent you email.
As an SEO expert, I discovered that your website seems spammy, subpar, and duplicated.
I read a few posts and looked at a few pages and discovered that they were “copy/pasted” from other reputable websites.
The reason Google punished your site is obvious. Additionally, it is unrelated to Discourse.
How can you help us remove the Google penalty from https://howtodiscuss.com ?
What would you do if you were at my shoes to remove the penalty and recover lost SEO rankings?
You have to write real category descriptions, there’s no escaping that.
Google thinks your site is low-effort, and you’re reinforcing that sentiment by trying to skip making the minimum required effort when creating new categories. Each category needs a unique and distinct description. It’s an opportunity to provide content for both your users and search engines which crawl the site.
Again though, as I’ve already pointed out several times and others have echoed, this isn’t a Discourse-related problem. An SEO community would be far better placed to help you with Google issues.
Okay we will try to fix the category description thing.
Other than that, if you think something else is wrong with our site that makes Google think our site is low quality, please do share.
For one, your site has 157,000 topics, yet the busiest discussion only has 64 replies. Looking at that topic the replies aren’t responses, they’re text lifted from websites such as TheSpruce:
Have you considered the possibility that in its current form Google might be right?
When Google indexes a page the contents are compared to other pages already held within the search index. Google knows where content was first posted. When it detects duplicate content which has been copied from other sites, it will treat the duplicated copy as blogspam.
We really can’t give you tips on how to cheat the algorithm, even if we could this behavior is deeply unethical.
Can you tell us exactly which tool and method you used to detect and find this plagiarism so that we can try to scan our entire site and all our pages for such issues and fix all such URLs.?
Moreover, i think Google can be wrong in this because, I have found other sites which are copying content from my site exactly, and I think Google is confused and marking our site as copied whereas the other sites are copying our content. and the content is originally posted on our site by our writer’s team.
Look at this as an example , this site https://rotaractbeirut.org/ 1 is copying all content from our site howtodiscuss.com 1
There are many more sites which are copying content from our site https://howtodiscuss.com/
Also, If we publish content first and big sites copy our article and google indexes them first (due to their frequent crawl rate) than our content, then how can we prove google that we are the ones who first originally wrote that article?
Just because you mentioned TheSpruce, it could also be the case that, TheSpruce copied content from Howtodiscuss and not vice versa. Just because a big brand is high authority site, it does not stop them from copying small websites content. Like in the above example I gave. Where another site is copying all our articles.
Having said that, if you can provide us the tool or method to bulk scan our entire site and find us all URLs for all plagiarized content, so we can get it all fixed immediately. and please do share with us how did you find that duplicate content from our site?
I have hired a huge team of writers and invested a lot of money on them to publish best quality, unique content, manually written, well researched content. I do want to stop this plagiarism from happening on my site if the writers did any by mistake.
I want to get my site cleaned as soon as possible and get rid of all plagiarised, duplicate content from my site. Is there any help I can get from discourse dev/technical side of things to speed up this process or to help us find plagiarism in all those 157,000 topics we have? i have reached to SEO communities but they are not able to really help me clean my site. So that’s why I posted this issue on Discourse as you guys are experts have solutions to almost all kind of problems.
I am still worried that even if we publish original content at first and some big sites rips our content and Google indexed them first then Google will call them as first publisher ( due to their frequent crawl authority) but in fact we were the ones who published it first. How can we fix this and stop Google from confusing our site as the one who copied instead of the original thief.
Literally all bot users and stolen content. I think google got it right.
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