If you are the kind of person that frets and stresses over stolen content – don’t. At least, don’t worry if you’re wearing protection. What sort of protection – easy, an internal link or a link to your home page. I noticed that my post – The Politics Of Iran – Why I Don’t Care – was rather heavily scrapped – Now I have link protection, I am not too worried.
It’s very rare for scraped content to outrank the original. If it does, make a spam complaint to Google and that should fix that problem. If it doesn’t outrank you – why worry. In fact, if you include links to your own content, a scraped copy may just add to the number of inbound links you have. Sure, they are not quality links, but use decent anchor text in your links and it will at least help to boost your pages for that keyword.
Even Matt Cutts from Google agrees with this sentiment:
Here are two tips that may help.
Place a link to your own content in the first paragraph – there are many scrapers that only take the first one or two paragraphs.
Grap a plugin that puts a resource box at the foot of every post - DDAdSig is one – check WordPress for more.
Now, to all those scrapers out there – please feel free to scrape my content – you may just make my day!
Are you ready for hidden comments on your web sites? Not just blogs BTW, I am talking about all web pages. The comments will not appear on your site and you will have no control over them.
Google is releasing a new toy called SideWiki. It is what the name suggests, a Side Wiki. It is a tool that is downloaded and installed into your browser. As you are surfing it brings up comments that have been left by other SideWiki users. It will also display links to relevant sites – that is one area that should disturb those that include Google ad unites on their pages. Visitors will be able to click away – for free – you wont get paid a cent.
The idea is that as you are surfing, you leave comments on the fly, in the SideWiki, not on the site it self. I know I would prefer my visitors to leave their comments here, not in some sidebar hidden from most users.
Check out the video and tell me if you like Google’s new toy.
If the concept takes off – and that is a big if – it could have severe downsides for many websites.
Fortunately, this is one concept that I expect to see die in the A?. Most people don’t like installing toolbars, particularly if they get in the way of normal surfing – a sidebar probably will. Users will also have to create a Google profile to activate the SideWiki.
All-in-all, if I was a Google shareholder I would be disappointed in what they are spending their money on.
I have a site that I have carefully built creating content, submitting articles and generally doing all the right things when it comes to SEO. I was quite pleased to see this site finally hit the front page of Google’s search results. It currently sits at number four out of 18 million pages.
That was the easy part. The hard part is actually getting any traffic. There are around 8000 searches each month for that keyword yet I was only receiving about 100 visitors from Google. For a number four listing I thought it a little strange.
Being a busy little beaver I thought no more about it until early last week when I decided to have another look at where it was situated in the search results and what I could do to improve matters. It is still at number four yet the traffic has not improved. When I started looking at the sites in the search results one thing stuck out – their snippets where great and mine was a shocker.
So I went to work. I wrote, rewrote and then wrote again until I had snippet that I though would compete with the competition. Now to get Google to publish it. My first step was to publish it as a title tag in the pages header.
I also rewrote my opening paragraph to paraphrase the title tag. Both the title tag and the opening paragraph used the keyword for that page and really sold the contents of the page.
That was last weekend. It wasn’t until Thursday that I noticed the new snippet in place and from there my traffic has at least tripled. More importantly, my income from that site has least quadrupled.
Just think, it only took one aspect of my SEO to undo all the hard work I had put into it. I have you checked your pages snippet lately?
Most bloggers would be aware of google’s dislike of paid posts – more importantly, paid links in paid posts. If the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) gets its way, paid posts as such will be illegal.
The FTC is looking at plans to update its policies and their sights are set fairly and squarely on bloggers, paid posts and viral marketing. For bloggers who earn their small dollars each month writing paid posts – the time may have come to look else where.
Why the attack on paid posts? I said Google doesn’t like the paid links. For the FTC, they see paid posts as dishonest reviews – in other words, rather than writing a truthful review of a product or site, you are being paid to write a positive review.
Now I know there are a couple of pay for post sites that pay for the link. You don’t have to actually review the site or the product. If the link is to a kitchen sink site, just write any old post about kitchen sinks and include a link, it doesn’t have to be a review. Now, I wonder if the FTC will include them in their ban?
The next question is what will the FTC do to those bloggers that do write paid reviews? Will they prosecute and turn them into criminals? That is fine if you are based in the US. What if your based in Britain, Europe or Australia – will the law cross borders?
This is the biggest hurdle to any government agency trying to control the internet. You may be able to control what is happening within your own border, you cannot control the events from outside your borders. Still, I guess they will try. In the meantime, the poor old blogger is the one that will cop it on the chin – again!
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