Earlier this week Google’s “head of web spam”—Matt Cutts—posted on his blog that they’re implementing a change in their algorithm that impacts those that publish content from elsewhere on the Web.
The changes are all about ranking the original sources of content higher than those who scrape/republish/copy it. This has always been Google’s intent but increasingly some have been seeing scraped content ranking higher than original sources.
In Matt’s words:
“The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”
This has a couple of implications for bloggers of different types.
For those who produce blogs with original content, it hopefully means not being out-ranked by other sites reproducing your content (with or without permission). As someone who finds his own content appearing on other sites many times a day (many times without credit of the source), for me this is a welcome change.
For those who do use scraping (or syndication) strategies, this news might stimulate a rethink in that approach. I know there are times and places for syndication (particularly if you do so with permission), but this serves as a reminder that in most cases if you’re looking to build a prominent and successful blog, you need to produce something that’s not only relevant and useful, but is also unique.
This is good news. Of course, and I’m not condoning this, anyone who uses a content spinner can still rip your content and reap the full benefit from it.
At last, a crack-down on this behaviour. Blogging is supposed to be fun! If you’re just copying other material in the hopes of being successful, then you’ve no place here. Find your own voice!
This is not only for blogging but you will be able to see everywhere these kind of things are happening.
With wordpress you can build a blog within few seconds and can get free theme. Now you can use this blog as your celebrity website or game website. They just need to copy contents from others.
But however these kind of websites are getting too many exposure from web 2.0 and social media as well. So if they stop getting traffic from Google or search engine even after that they will be able to survive.
But yes as far as search engine uses is concern we will get more good and relevant websites in our search queries after this step implemented.
So true Darren!
People are so concerned with generating traffic and building links that they forget about the importance of developing original content. Obviously, having unique content not only benefits you in terms of search, but it’s the single most effective way to stand out from the crowd.
Point well taken. Hope you’re not affected by the cyclone!
My visitor recording some amazing numbers for the past 3 days, thats to Google for the change.
:-)
Looks like automated blogs are going to get hit.
Thanks! I’ve only “reblogged” once, and I felt guilty because I felt like I was “getting her hits” or something.
Well said. My archaeology site’s feed is showing up in its entirety on blogs, as well entire articles. Even guest posts are being copy/pasted on blogspot domains. I’m glad for the change. I’ve used snippets of info from news sites before pertaining to archaeological discoveries. but I have never used the entire post.
Furthermore, the sites ranked higher than mine (archaeology) are using copied material and they are showing up in top positions on Google. That burns me up!
It will be very interesting to see if the new search results will come back with less repetitive results. It’s frustrating (as both a publisher and search user) to see several results, all linking to different sites, but to the same content.
That’s a fair initiative.
This is good news for content creators. Not so good for MMF folks, though. (Guess whose side I take in this?)
I’ve had bad problems with scrapers in the past – let’s hope this finally puts them down there in the black hole they deserve.
There are also some people who think by scraping their own content across a huge amount of other blogs they own (and forums) they’ll “dominate” google and get more traffic. Sadly it doesn’t work, I know because I tried it.
This is a tremendous step in the right direction and there are so many ways they can share someones great content via there blog, that to scrape it wholesale just seems lazy.
This is good news – but I hope they can accurately determine which site is the original and which is the copy.
Good to know Darren and very well put. :)
Question. Do I have to buy a copyright to protect my content? I remember recently a story of a magazine that was busted for stealing someone’s content (from their blog) without permission. They had it printed and gave her credit. When confronted, they blew it off and said basically that whenever you put anything on the web you’re susceptible to having it “used” by other people. She showed no remorse but rather ridiculed the blogger for asking for compensation for her article!
Here is the link in case you missed the story:
http://blogs.findlaw.com/free_enterprise/2010/11/stealing-content-magazine-lifts-bloggers-article.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+FreeEnterprise+%28Free+Enterprise%29
That magazine ended up being shut down as a result! So I guess my question is: Do I have to buy a copyright to have rights to my own material? Thanks Darren.
Hi Christin,
I once consulted a lawyer to find out about copyright. I remember he told me the following:
* An idea cannot be copyrighted. Only, and this is key, the expression of the idea. So you could write a book on the same topic as anyone it is how you tell the story that makes it your copyright.
* Once you write down an original expression of an idea you have the copyright. You can pay for and register the copyright to give you more protection and proof that it is yours. So if you write a book it is worth the 50 or so dollars to register the copyright but not so financially feasible to register copyright for each article your write in a paper or blog. A personal and business choice as always.
I hope this helps.
If you have more questions you can often contact a public legal service office where you can get some valuable advice for a small donation.
Good question and best of success to you,
David
The flip side of all this to consider is whether you really want to protect your blog posts that closely. Yes, I too think this is great news. Seeing a scrapped article ranking higher than the original is daft.
However, if your blog is a platform for you, why would you want to stop being from spreading you? Your bright, shiny expressions of an idea are wonderful I don’t doubt. And yes, content scrapping is a blight on humankind. But having created your golden nugget, why not allow people to help spread your genius by quoting (and crediting) you? Just a thought.
Thank you so much for your reply and information, David. That makes total sense.
There is a free third-party service (http://myfreecopyright.com/) that subscribes to your blog’s RSS feed and then maintains a public record of the date of creation. So if someone steals your content and you need to prove it’s yours, you can at least prove the date and time that the content first appeared on your blog. I’ve been using the service for a few years now.
Christin,
My understanding is that you own the copyright to your work the moment you create it, but that filing – and paying – for the copyright would provide you additional protections, primarily after your death. If you visit the copyright website, you can get all the specifics in their FAQs.
I think it’s a great thing that Google’s doing, the whole point of good search engine is to give the user what they’re looking for. Not to bring a lot of visitors to sites that don’t offer anything new…
Thanks for sharing Darren,
This is great news and should have been implemented already.
I do hope we’ll start to see the junk clear from the search results.
Cheers,
Togrul
While cool and all, this concerns me from the point of view that google may start giving other sites credit for my work. Matt doesn’t mention anything about that. How can they be sure that they aren’t? I’m a small player in a small niche. If they start giving credit to more popular sites for my work, I’m effectively screwed.
Presumably they can tell who created the content first, though in the case of scrapers that pounce on content the second it’s published, what would happen if the scrapers feed got to Google before the original feed?
I am guessing Google will use its existing knowledge of what makes a good website (eg links, length of time online, reputation of content in general). ie “legitimatesite.com” will generally get the credit over “spammy-illegitimate-site.blogspot.com” if the date stamps are near identical. That doesn’t mean legitimate-site couldn’t still be penalised on an article-by-article basis if it did lift content verbatim from another site.
Knowing Google, they’ve got some decent algorithms going on in the background and will hone them over time.
You say: “I’m a small player in a small niche. If they start giving credit to more popular sites for my work, I’m effectively screwed.”
Does this mean that you have evidence that some larger players in your niche are using your content without permission/attribution? You could take some action against them if this is the case.
This, for me is a good news. I’ve been writing unique content since i started my site.
I’m glad to see the change. I’ve seen so much of my content on scraper sites this year, many of ill repute. I don’t use other people’s content. When I get to that point, I’m going to enlist guest bloggers and/or use services with legitimate publishing agreements so that the original writer gets their due. I think as someone who came from a writing background, I’m more sensitive to use issues and giving credit.
I’ve spent some time personally contacting scraper sites that have usurped my content without giving me credit. I hope that this change is a positive one. When so many of us who produce content are competing with people who will produce “content” for $2.00 an article, this could be a positive move to protect the real writers out there.
Thanks for letting us know.
For those of us who battle to turn out original material – it’s a boon!
This is good news coming from Google, at least at face value. Time will tell. Another thing to look at as well is reusing your own blog articles and syndicating them on article directories for traffic and backlinking. It would be nice, although time consuming I know, to see only quality original content ranking in the search results.
Christin: “Do I have to buy a copyright to protect my content?”
Definitely not! Your original works are copyright provided you simply declare as such i.e. “Copyright (c) 2011 MyContent – All Rights Reserved.”. Typically this is accomplished via your terms page which should cover all copyrights & trademarks (both yours and others you include or link to – either directly or indirectly) and apply to all of your relevant domains.
Nobody can take your copyright content and use against your wishes outside of “fair use” +/- DMCA – for example, this site and others syndicate their feeds & expect that their syndicated (portions of) content will be rendered accurately + professionally and with proper attribution, etc., meaning that the associated links should point to the original host site / article / media (albeit with rel=’nofollow’ as typical in such cases).
Hope that helps :)
I have heard about this and I am really glad there’s a crack down on this! Hope it will actually be effective. Looking forward to the results. Scraping and mass content blogs just to lead to another blog, is getting real old.
Great news! This Google change gives more value to originality and insight as it ought to be. It also gives incentives correctly, in terms of higher visibility, to those who create content than to those who enhance their billboards by creating an artificial highway from other people’s work (by gaming SEO rules).
@Christin
no, you do not have to “buy a copyright” to protect your content. By law, as soon as you publish something online or offline, you own the copyright. That magazine was completely misinformed.
Just wondering, what the impact will likely be on those people that take snippets of an RSS feed (which link to the original site)?
Eg I’m the web administrator of the website for our local rugby club’s website, and I take the RSS feed of the Australian Rugby Union and put a snipet in a navigation column as it is fairly relevant for our members.
Will this start to negatively impact on the unique content we are generating?
I think this has always been issue with the blogger (legit one). Google can penalize the copier from their side but I think it will still be the problem on the network about getting credit for Original writer.
It is about time that the algorithm is changed to protect the original content. What will be the impact if people are reusing their own content on sites like EzineArticles.com?
Rob
That’s an interesting one! I wonder if people will be less likely to republish articles from such directories knowing that they may be even more heavily penalised by Google?
I wouldn’t personally publish any of my own articles on both an article directory and my own web site. As to what effect it has on distribution, that remains to be seen. It’s often the scrapers and fast content building tools that use these sites the most as it is, from my experience.
Goodbye article marketing for backlinks?
I am glad that Google is starting to clean up the internet. Every time I search I get hits for the exact same article, different authors. I hate that.
This is great Darren. I have seen my guest articles on ProBlogger all over the place as well as those from my own blog, and not all of them keep the author credit in tact which is just infuriating. Original content writers should always get the credit for their hard work, and creative thought.
Sound like a winning situation for true content originators. Yay! I hope Bing, Yahoo and other search engines do the same.
That’s funny, I had always thought that Google indexed the original source first and then ranked any copies lower. Obviously for some people that is not the case. Either way, the rule stays the same – if you’re creating your own original content then you’ll be alright. If you’re doing something dodgy then you deserve what happens to you.
I’ve been in a mental debate about this for a while… a local paper asked me to write an article on relationships for their website at least once a week. The deal is they get to post the original article and have it exclusively for one week before I post it on my own site. In exchange I am listed as a feature blogger, and get to create all sorts of great links to my content, etc. Traffic referrals from them aren’t bad.
I figure I’m helping myself out in the short-term, but shooting myself in the foot over time since they are not the original source for content and will always (or should always) rank higher than me for those articles. Which is OK, it still links back to me from their site.
Still, I often wonder if this is the best thing or if I should just keep my articles and let my traffic build on it’s own a little. Not too different from guest posting tho, right?
As long as the site who re-publishes the article (in this case, it is my own article on both sites) doesn’t get punished overall (so my other articles rank lower because Google detects that 1/3 of my content is re-published material) then it sounds like this could only be a good thing.
I certainly don’t want another site (that isn’t me) scraping my content and ranking higher than I do… that would bite.
For what it’s worth, I’d avoid republishing that article on your own site. Let them have it exclusively (you could always repurpose the theme for your own site, just don’t copy it verbatim). If the inbound links and exposure is worth sacrificing one article a week, presuming that you’re writing more original content for your own site, then that seems a reasonable deal to me.
To answer Christin’s question on copyright: no you absolutely don’t have to buy it! It is completely automatic and literally means that the creator of the content has the sole rights to copy, unless they opt to transfer that to somebody else. Ideas aren’t copyrightable but any solid piece of finished work is. As someone formerly working in the film and television industry I know all about this given piracy and whatnot!
Woohoo! I hope this is successful. As one who writes original content, it’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.
I feel flattered when I see other people thinking enough of my stuff to publish it. And the way that I learned it blogging was all about syndication. The only problem would be if the site using my posts had a higher ranking than mine which so far has never been the case and that is exactly what Google is trying to make sure of here. Interesting to consider though.
I’ve been increasingly finding that sites will republish with a small link 1/2 to 2/3 of one of my articles….this will be a welcome change and should improve the rankings of all the blogs/sites i write for which are VERY original content heavy.
This is a very good news indeed! I personally think there where too much “autobloggers” on internet. I hope this is the beginning of end for those who copy-paste contents from other sources! Good way Google :)
As someone who struggles to write – but get me to draw you a picture and I’m there! I glad Google is stepping up on this one.
If someone where to rip off my business tips on my graphic design blog then I hope Google jump all over them!
Is Google the new net police? and does that make the the GNP? :-)
Finally! Even though most of my writing goes on fairly small blogs, I seem to have an unreal amount of content lifted for use on other sites. It’s nice to know Google is finally doing something about the rankings of content thieves.
Hip Hip, Hooray!!! Its time to give credit to the real thinkers!
This is a good thing and I do appreciate such actions from Google. I have one question: What about sites that translate content to another language ? Does anyone know if Google can rank translated content or is that of no consern ?
This is great news. Think about the technology it requires for Google to pull off such a plan. They’ve got some SERIOUS grey matter over there! Game on!
Darren
This as everyone above has said, is welcoming news. A site like yours has to be overrun with scrapers. It is maddening that this happens as write your own stuff to become a better writer. Don’t know what to write, then use you probably should not have a blog as there are a myriad of topics to write about.
I guess once again that trying to take the easy way out has repercussions.
It’s about time they cracked down on this sort of theft, I know how much time I spend writing articles each and every day, the last thing I want is to see it on some splog!
Is there anyway to penalize someone less who does have authorization to re-publish or syndicate content? What if you paid for a service to produce content that others have as well? Or will Google just do a better job at no indexing duplicate content on a page? So many questions….
Will this create more demand for spninng software programs?
Hey, um, can I copy this article and post it on my blog?
Thanks for this article Darren and not before time Google.
There is nothing more soul-destroying than having spent time and effort writing a post and then finding some other person has ripped it off.
I always request my work is removed from other “scraper” sites when I come across it.
What doesn’t seem clear to me is how does Google determine which copy was the original. The first copy seen by a Googlebot doesn’t mean it’s the original – sites get indexed at different frequencies. Google says that they “do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results” (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359) but this doesn’t really fill me with confidence. Has anyone seen a better explanation of how they do it?
Finally, I won’t need to worry about the content rip offs anymore :D thanks Google *hugs
Being unique is what a blogger or blogging is all about. If your content is unique then you have unique traffic and popularity. But also you will need some people’s work to justify your works as well. So sometimes it works as a mutual relationship.