Should We Report Scraped Content To Google?
September 28th, 2007
Written By: Adam Sussman
What should a webmaster do when he finds that their content has been duplicated and posted on another site?
Let’s take for example the post I wrote last Saturday called “The Risk of Rewarding Ideas”. This was one of those posts which I actually spent quite a while writing and it was something I was proud of. I had a concept for something I was trying to explain and I spent all day trying to craft my thoughts out to paper. For those of you who blog you know this is not such an easy thing to do.
When I release this post to go live I hope Google crawls the site, picks it up and runs with it. But here lies the rub -
Let’s say someone built a blog whose only purpose is to display other people’s blog posts in an effort to make money using contextual advertising such as Adsense. Using RSS, this person keeps a list of his favorite bloggers and as soon as one of them posts something new, he has the ability to take it and post it on his blog as if it is one of his own.
Because RSS is so quick, it gives him a tool which allows him to almost immediately capture and display other bloggers posts. Thus, it’s almost a coin toss as to who Google will give credit to while they randomly crawl and index the web.
If Google happens to index the other site before visiting mine, they may very well tag his post as the original. By the time they get to mine, they may flag mine as duplicate content. Any webmaster worth his salt knows duplicate content is to be avoided at all cost.
I of course want credit for being the original author of my posts, but must I now have to be a tattletale and nark out other webmasters? Is that the game I must play?
Many of us who earn our living working online live by a few unspoken rules.
- To each his own
- Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones
I am afraid with how Google handles duplicate content and hands out their penalties we may have to live by the motto
- All is fair in love and war
September 28th, 2007 11:53
Because Google’s algo sucks they need users to tell them what’s broken. Love the great music!
September 28th, 2007 12:11
I think that is why so many people want Google to come out with an author code.
There are quite a few ideas on how this could work.
You could have a registered author code for google and maybe go to their register content page. Then paste in your article and push submit before you actually publish it online. That would associate that article with your code and website url.
It is an extra step but something to think about.
September 28th, 2007 12:44
I’m dealing with this very same issue. Ironic, because it’s how I found your blog post.
What I can’t stand is these fake, cheap, low-life, spam-bloggers are not even attributing the article with my name…
I’d like to think there was some proactive solution, instead of wasting our time reacting and, as you say, tattling.
Great post and great blog. I’ve just added you to my growing list of fave blogs.
September 30th, 2007 16:13
I just wanted to mention that who gets indexed first doesn’t really play into it. It is generally a case of which has more ‘authority’ - something to remember if one distributes content legitimately that is also on their site. Simply getting it indexed prior to distribution isn’t going to matter. If the site it is distributed on has greater authority, it will still generally out rank the original.
Just some thoughts in passing :0)
Dave
November 26th, 2007 09:06
I have a problem where my site is new and thus has very little ‘authority’ and i just found my entire site scraped and posted (favicon and all), I found the site in google so it’s obviously been indexed, I just hope that it doesn’t bury my site in the long run.