An editor from the popular news site The Verge tweeted that a new article was replaced on page one of Google’s search results by other sites that had copied it. Danny Sullivan answers why that is happening.
Can Google Handle Ranking Original Content?
Copied content that outranks the original is something that publishers have expressed frustration about for many years.
Some of the complaints are due to a misunderstanding.
For example, when a person searches a nonsense phrase like randomly selected words from an article, Google doesn’t know what to do with that’s not a real search query and there is no answer for a nonsense phrase.
So what Google does is to default to a text search, which means that Google is returning search results based on the words in a search query matching the words on a web page.
The real test for whether copied content is outranking the original content is when copied content outranks the original content for competitive keywords that users actually make.
Should a Page Rank Twice if It’s in a Top Stories Result?
But this situation that popped up introduces a different scenario. What happened is that Google will not rank an article headline in the top of the normal search results if that web page is already ranking in the Top Stories featured results, at the top of the web page.
Top Stories is a featured result where Google shows news articles related to a search query.
So if someone searches for a headline Google will usually show the article at the top of the search results in a Top Stories section.