From: www.whistlestopper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=79781
I staff write for another blog about freelance writing. Earlier this month I received a pingback on my most recently published post there. Being a diligent soul, I immediately went to check the pingback site. Uh-oh. The post in its entirety was published there. Credit was given but it was pretty much in the fine print. I immediately sent an email to the owner of the freelance writing site to let her know the situation. I considered the issue closed at that point.
About two weeks later, guess what? Yup. Another pingback – same site. Another email to my boss.
As it turns out, the thieving site owner actually didn’t remove the content. My boss’s response was essentially that the site owner had better make the links do-follow and that this kind of thing just happens. She also pointed out to me that the incoming link is not necessarily bad from an SEO point of view.
That made sense to me.
On one hand, thieving content sucks and is a practice I wouldn’t engage. On the other hand, if I was credited on the site and I get a link back, is there really a foul?
What are your thoughts? Have you been thieved? how did you handle it?
I have had my content swiped, George. At first, it frustrated me to no end. I’d email every site owner (if contact info was available) and tell them they didn’t have permission to post my content/they hadn’t purchased it, etc., and in the end I have pretty much just given up.
Some of those people would remove it and some never did. Some of my stuff has been published in its entirety and some is just excerpts. All the ones I’ve found, though, have given credit and I actually do get some traffic from them so I guess overall, I can’t complain.
Like you, I’d never swipe someone else’s content. It’s just not tasteful, in my opinion. But I think this is something we may have to just live with, unfortunately.
.-= Michele´s last blog ..7 Tips for Getting that Writing Gig Without an English Degree =-.
Hi Michele,
I think you are right on the money here. It’s kind of like spam – something we have to live with.
George
Yeah, spam is a whole’ nother story though–so aggravating! LOL
.-= Michele´s last blog ..7 Tips for Getting that Writing Gig Without an English Degree =-.
Every post I write is scraped by someone. They never fail to miss a single post.
While some are the full article, most only give a short piece of the article. But they all link back to my blog.
Since it literally happens with every post it would be a waste of my time to track down the people doing it, so I let it be… knowing that the backlinks are helping my pagerank, and no one else ever really sees the spam blogs that are scraping the content.
.-= Steven-Sanders´s last blog ..The 5 Phases of Social Media =-.
Hi Steven,
That’s a great attitude about the situation. Pretty realistic, too.
Nice to see you here.
George
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Well, I never had anybody take the whole post but I love with they take part of the post with a backlink to the post with author text.
.-= Deneil Merritt´s last blog ..Is Your Blog A Community? =-.
Hey Deneil,
That’s how I see it too.
George
Think of it this way. You’re writing stuff that’s good enough to scrape! That’s what I do. Why generate additional bad energy?
.-= Betsy Wuebker´s last blog ..CHANGE DOESN’T COME FROM THE TOP =-.
I mean that’s what I think, not that I scrape. Doh!
.-= Betsy Wuebker´s last blog ..CHANGE DOESN’T COME FROM THE TOP =-.
Hey Betsy,
I totally got your meaning. Great positive spin!
George
Hi George,
My knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Heck yeah, do whatever it takes to fight them!” However, especially as your work becomes better known and publicized, it would likely become impossible to police all of the offenders. As you and Michele suggest, an author’s best bet may simply be to do what he/she can to derive some benefit from these offensive and only expend effort to rectify the most egregious offenses. After all, life is too short to spend all your time being angry, right?
Evan
.-= Evan´s last blog ..Light and Creamy Mac and Cheese =-.
Woot! Hi Evan!
Yup. Some things just aren’t worth getting in a twist over.
Welcome back.
George
Is it true that duplicate content can harm SEO? My company reuses content within each client’s marketing materials, but we’ve been instructed to always change the wording (except for standard company blurbs) to avoid giving the impression that we’re just creating pages with identical content. Perhaps they’re thinking across the same site, and not between different sites.
Either way, you’re getting a link in, and that can’t hurt.
.-= Liz @ ExtremeTelecommute´s last blog ..Packing for Long-term International Travel: Gear and Gadgets =-.
Hey Liz!
To some extent I do think it’s all about the links – I mean once I get past the whole ethical thing.
You are dead on right – It can’t hurt.
George
I’m in the same boat as Steven, I think nearly every article I write ends up on some spam blog. I just can’t keep up with it, and I figure what the heck – it’s a link.
Matt
.-= Matt | Small Biz Bee´s last blog ..Seven Habits of Highly Effective Twitter Users =-.
Matt,
“what the heck – it’s a link.”
At first, I was a bit miffed, but ultimately I developed the attitude quoted here.
George
That attitude was only born out of the futility of fighting the scrapers
.-= Matt | Small Biz Bee´s last blog ..Seven Habits of Highly Effective Twitter Users =-.
Hi, George,
I like it when people rip my posts. Even if the link is in 8-point type. This stolen text creates search results and, who knows, may lead to a new gig.
Let them take it. I’m always surprised where my stuff ends up. Posted a piece to my blog on merchant accounts. It’s been on the home-page of an outsourcing service that handles order fulfillment for six months.
Fine with me, and it generates 8-10 hits a day to my site. I look at it as a compliment – as long as the user links back.
Hope things are well with you, and thanks for linking up on FB. Nice to have friends.
Paul “Webwordslinger” Lalley
.-= Webwordslinger´s last blog ..The Disappearing Web Biz: Presto! Your Site Disappears Overnight. =-.
Hi Paul,
Always nice to see you around.
The links don’t hurt and I’ll take every visitor here as a plus.
Things are great, Paul.
George
It’s okay to have a small excerpt and link to ‘read the full article.’ Usually the offending site makes some money (e.g. Adsense) off your efforts. However it’s money you would not get anyway and the link may bring real readers and ad clicks. I’ve had full content stolen with no linkback. I felt angry since that particular post made heavy use of graphics which can not be hot-linked — omitting them detracts from the post. Usually the person will remove it. The worst was a thief who took every other post, no links, copied the graphics to his directory and then had the nerve to comment on my blog several times! When he did not respond, had no choice but to report to his host who closed the account.
.-= SBA´s last blog ..Step By Step Guide To Increasing Search Engine Traffic =-.
SBA,
Seriously? Someone did that? Amazing. I’m glad to see the host took care of the problem.
Thanks for coming by and contributing.
George
Had a similar discussion on ProBlogger recently, which led to one on mine, too.
It’s a difficult situation: on the one hand it’s theft, on the other it’s incoming links and extra hits. I’m with most people on the fact that taking a WHOLE article is very, very bad juju. That’s just insulting and, if your site is PR-small compared to the thief, can knock you down the search engines (I would imagine).
On the other hand, if someone takes the first paragraph and links, I see no problem. That’s just extra traffic. It can also be quite funny – since the whole thing is almost always automated, you can end up with (in my case) marketing sites linking back to an article about why marketing sites suck…
Full-blown plagiarism should always be knocked on the head, IMHO.
.-= SpikeTheLobster´s last blog ..Sponsored Blog Posts =-.
Hey Spikey,
I’m in agreement about the full blown plagiarism thing. Here’s a link to a little fable about it:
http://tumblemoose.com/the-writers-fable/
Cheers!
I’ve got several sites publishing almost all of my game site content. I give up — at least credit and URL are there. The site doesn’t look one bit original, so I’m not too worried about it.
However, Google apparently penalizes for duplicate content on multiple sites — I think this rule needs a serious review because of situations like these. I know they want to stop those who have 20+ sites and copy the same content across the board. But it does hurt legitimate sites and some people still put high value on PageRank.
.-= Meryl K Evans´s last blog ..PC Game Review: DinerTown Detective Agency =-.
Hi Meryl,
Several folks have said this as well and I guess I wish I knew just how much it impacts PR. Does one or two scrapes make a difference or do you need twenty of them to reach penalty threshold?
George
George,
Thanks for pointing this out. Does Google not have some sort of system in place to recognize the real writer of the article? Don’t they check who wrote the article and posted it first? Nothing like that?
I’ve had quite a few pingbacks, and till now, I didn’t think anything of them.
.-= The Gooroo @ Finance Advisory Stop´s last blog ..How To Overcome Loneliness If You Work From Home =-.
Hey Gooroo,
I don’t know if the algorithm recognizes original ie: by date content or not. Good question.
I still think that overall, the pings may not be bad
Yeah, I’m not sure either. I’m sure that there is something in place though to give credit to the original others. I mean, if there wasn’t, what would justify “duplicate content”. I could take someones work and say I posted it. This would be neat to look into — I might just do that.
.-= The Gooroo @ Finance Advisory Stop´s last blog ..Car Leases And Their Hidden Costs =-.
You are one smart cookie, Gooroo.
I’m diggin’ your style.
George
I don’t know if Google recognises by date, but I do know they’ll ban someone’s AdSense account if they’re caught plagiarising.
That’s how I got one of my (most popular) articles removed from a thief’s site – I threatened to snitch on them to Google, which would have meant ALL their scraping sites would earn… nothing. Mwuhahaha!
.-= SpikeTheLobster´s last blog ..10 Myths Of Freelance Writing =-.
I’ve had countless articles lifted by scraper sites, often just part of the article . . . which makes no sense to me unless they’re just trying to increase their page count. One time the scraped article actually outranked me in the search results, but at least it had a link back to me.
I often link to myself within posts, with the thought I’ll get the same links if anyone scrapes my article, but I do know many of these scraper sites strip out all links . . . so there isn’t much to do about it.
I haven’t had any (known) direct thefts, but that doesn’t mean they’re out there.
.-= Terry Heath´s last blog ..Five Writing Tips to Engage Readers =-.
Hi Terry,
I hadn’t thought about the internal links thing. So far, any of the sites that have thieved my stuff have kept the links in tact.
I’m sure there is other thievary happening and the best I can do is say, “Oh, well.”
Cheers
George
Ok, here’s my take on this issue.
Duplicate Content
Not too big of a deal unless you see that those other sites are out ranking you in search engines for keywords / phrases. Google eventually will find scraper sites and shut them down, so I usually don’t worry about the duplicate content issue.
Good SEO
Yes it is nice having one way “relevant” links to your article (if there is a link linking back to you, which isn’t always the case). In this case, it could help some.
Bad SEO
Sooner or later Google will get wise to scraper sites and when it does, guess who’s site is getting a ton of incoming links from a “bad” website in Google’s eyes? YOU!
People always talk about how highly relevant one way links pointing to your site from sites with high authority tells Google that your site is important.
What do you think Google thinks when it sees dozens, if not hundreds, of extremely poor ranked and untrusted websites linking to you?
Ahh, A comment from an expert!
Coolio, John. Thanks for dropping by with the lesson.
That put things right into perspective.
George
What? Google must have kind of algorithm to analyze that and weighing it ‘wisely’. A lot of good ranked website/blog would have ‘bad’ ranked website/blog link-back to them.
.
Well, not my concern right now. I’m just starting my blog
Thanks for enlightening me John.
Adi
.-= Adi F. Paputungan´s last blog ..Success Path in Marketing a Product: Introduction =-.
Hey Adi,
Thanks for coming by. Best of luck to you and your new blog.
Cheers!
George
Oh sorry, you said ‘sooner or later’. Didn’t caught that part (pretty paranoid aren’t I?). My bad..
Adi
.-= Adi F. Paputungan´s last blog ..Success Path in Marketing a Product: Introduction =-.
Hey George,
This is a very interesting topic, publishing original work, and then someone comes along, and copies and pastes (thieves). I don’t have a blog yet, but planning ahead I have often thought if there were measures I could take to stop this kind of activity. Then I came across Zen Habits’ Leo Babauta, and his Uncopyright idea, http://su.pr/1MYtv6 and have decided I will take his route. In the end, I will let karma have its way. Thanks as always on the interesting article about the writing world.
Jorin.
.-= Jorin Cowley´s last blog ..JorinCowley: @clementyeung If you can’t order food on Twitter yet, some company soon, is going to make billions! =-.
Jorin,
Thanks for the link. I went over and had a peek at the Zen Habits article. That’s awesome! Folks, go check out the great perspective at the link.
Leo’s route is incredibly real and honest.
Good to see you here.
Cheers
George
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