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Website content: to borrow or not to borrow?

All webmasters who take care of a site’s content often rack their brains trying to find a fresh idea or perfect words for an article. In many cases, it seems easier to find some content elsewhere on the Web and re-use it. But will it be good for a site? And can the aim be achieved without violating a copyright?

Let’s make clear what ’stolen content’ means.

According to US copyright law (see http://www.copyright.gov for detailed information), content becomes ‘owned’ the moment its author publishes it on the website. So, if someone then uses it on another website without the author’s permission, it’s a definite case of a copyright infringement.

If you are able to prove that you were the first to publish something (with the help of the server logs or web archives cache with the publication date), you are considered its owner. You can go further and officially copyright something to prove ownership. Keep in mind that to apply for the copyright registration, you should refer to the copyright office in your country.

How can you find out if your content has been illegally used by someone else? Go to Google and search an excerpt of your text as an exact match (in double quotes). If there are crawlable sites that use your content, you will learn quickly from the search results. You can try the same syntax on all of the major search engines. Alternatively, use the plagiarism revealing service by Copyscape.

In many cases, search engines properly define the original texts and filter the duplicates out. But unfortunately, it may happen that the original website appears in search results lower than the infringer’s site or is even filtered out. In that case, ensure that robots.txt allows crawling for your page; that the page is properly optimized and present on the sitemap. Then, follow our advice:

• First step: contact the website owner politely asking them either to mention the author and the original page or remove the content. Sometimes this works.You may also try the Seomoz offer: ‘If you get a response from the website owner and she is resisting the removal of the content [or not replying at all – editor's note], it may be worth considering whether you can turn the infringer into an affiliate. Since it’s your content that’s driving ad sales, you may convince the infringer to give you a share of the ad revenue.’
• Second step: send a Take-Down Notice to the host and to the domain registrar of the infringer.Find their contact details in the whois lookup services. Explain in detail what happened and provide the proof of your authorship.
• If the worst comes to the worst, send a Take-Down Notice to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Some people may ask: what if I just place a copyright sign © after my site’s name and will not really bother registering each and every article on it? Well, you can do that, but if it comes to the point when your authorship is disputed, you will not be able to use the copyright privileges. It’s the same as if you write ‘beware of a dog’ on a door where there’s no dog behind.

Indisputably, writing original content is always your best option because it’s valuable both for your visitors and from a search engine optimization perspective. Besides, pages with duplicate content may be filtered by search engines more often than the original ones. It’s a general practice to corroborate your idea with an expert citation. What if you need to discuss some news or someone else’s idea in your blog? How do you do that the right way? The answer is: make such borrowing a fair use:

• Use excerpts. If you place a text extract and add a link to the original complete article, this will hardly be considered a copyright violation.
• Comment. Comment about somebody’s thoughts, add your personal insight, criticize them, or refer to them to describe something very specific.
• Research. Collect a few opinions referring to an issue, and mention their authors.
• Analyze. You cannot grab someone else’s ideas. But you can analyze them! Predict, forecast, in a word – think!All the above suggestions support the same idea: be creative even if you borrow other people’s ideas. Add value for your visitors; don’t just compile your content from other people’s hard work.
• Finally, take care to read the privacy rules of a website you want to borrow from. Authors often describe their requirements for material usage: ‘use only with author’s permission’ or ‘use only with the link to the source’.

Even if you place a link, the fact of borrowed content from someone else still remains. However, link presence is a positive factor, so people will most likely not bother to complain. Just keep in mind that the search engines might punish your page for overdoing it.

Links on this theme:
Copyright Law: What Search Marketers Should Know
Copyscape – Preventing Plagiarism of Your Online Content

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for September 2009.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors. Learn more about the formula.

What Experts Recommended

Most spammers use RSS feeds to scrape your content, placing anchored links within your feed will bring the benefit of not only getting credit for your work but possibly building valuable links back to your blog/website. It won’t stop the scrapers and it won’t protect your content, but it will ‘beat the scrapers’ at their own game.

Roberta Rosenberg,
Mariareyesmcdavis.com