My apologies since English is not my first language…….

Ok, I don’t post much here but this last update has been very discouraging for us. We own an 11 years old website, all the content has been written by us or by members of our small community (some are PhD), we always been white hat. We have around 5000 pages of original content develop thru these years and learn that a lot of sites copy word by word our content but Google always knew we were the first we had posted and rank higher than copycats.

Unfortunately the Panda update has hurt us with the loss of 20%-30% of the traffic so after a little investigation we found that a scraper site is now above us in mostly every search we used to be on top.

As I said we learn these years to trust Google’s algo in keeping scrapers of our site down in the search results. Around one year ago we notice a website that has been scraping ALL our content and content from thousands of other sites and posting it as if the original author did it, we didn’t care that much cause they always ranked lower than us.

With Panda this scraper now RANKS HIGHER than us in nearly every search. It doesn’t matter that our original content has been posted for 5 or 6 years before the scraper’s. They take 3,4,5 portions of an article from us and labeled with different phrases from the text.
So, for a search “red and blue widgets” that used to be:

1.Our content
2.Others content
3.Others content
4.scraper

Now is:

1.scraper
2.scraper’s version 2
3.scraper’s version 3
4.our content

To be fair the only thing we can spot is that the scrapers layout is “maybe nicer” than ours, but never thought that this is a beauty contest, just a relevancy and usability contest.

I have filled out 4 spam reports at Webmaster Tools the last days. But these reports are only on a page by page basis, and the scraper have around 1.500.000 scraped pages from hundreds of legitimate websites.

This small rant is to know if I am alone in this? How efficient a spam report to Google is? What would you do if you were in a similar situation? Is somebody at Google reading this post?

Any input would be appreciate …

Thank you