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Is content theft a bad thing?

Posted by george on July 21, 2009
Posted in: Writing. Tagged: , . 44 comments
thief

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?

If writing content is king

Posted by george on January 28, 2009
Posted in: Writing. Tagged: , , , . 14 comments

Then writing topic is Queen.

The wisdom out there is pretty clear.  If you want to bring folks to your site, keep them there and bring them back for more, then you must write outstanding content.  I certainly won’t dispute that.  What I will say is that there is a second part of the equation that rarely gets mentioned: Topic.

Topic is the yin to Content’s yang.  For either to be effective, they must rely on each other

A little lesson

I had posted a first in a series post in about the middle of January.  The intention was to publish part 2 a week later.  I kept meaning to get to it, but other posts kinda cropped up, a few guest posts showed up and yadda, yadda, yadda here it is almost the end of the month and I still didn’t have part 2 published.  Yikes. How time flies.

The lesson here is that even though I was posting good, regular content, it wasn’t necessarily on topic in terms of “Inspiring Writers Every Day”.  Anyone want to take a guess at which direction my analytics went over the second half of the month?  Yup.  Think, “ducks in winter”.

All is not lost

One of the things I’ve found is that rebounds are fairly easy.  As long as you remain resilient, all will be well.  If you lose your compass for a little while it’s ok, just get back on the path and you’ll be all shiny again in no time.

So your focus should be bi-directional.  Yes, you must deliver outstanding content on a regular basis.  If your blog is to succeed and weather any storms, it must also be on topic.  Readers come to your site expecting a certain type of content in terms of topic.  If they come by often enough and the conversation isn’t what they were expecting, that are likely to go find a place that does have what they were looking for.