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Article Plagiarism: the Next Internet Ripoff?
By Gordon Goodfellow
Content is King! shout the search engines. That's what the
search engines love. We also love the non-reciprocal links that
we get for our websites when our articles are published on other
peoples' sites with our resource boxes dutifully appended below
them.
To create a well written article takes time and effort. We have to
get everything right: it has to be of relevance to the reader in
that subject field; it has to be well researched; all spelling,
punctuation and grammar must be correction; it has to be a
genuine contribution to that particular area of specialization, and
so interesting that the editor will jump at the chance of
publishing it. And, oh yes, all the right keywords have to be
there, of the right density and in the correct proportions.
The well-crafted article must satisfy both the reader and the bot;
both the aesthetics of the eye and the strictures of the code. So
those of us who try and be at least a little bit serious about things
know that a second draft is always necessary, and then a third.
Then it's best to sleep on it. Even after that, we know that we
have to forget about it for a few days until we are able to come
back to it again with a freshly critical mind. You prune it and
nurture it. You take off the sharp edges and you tighten it up. If
necessary you know when you have to tear it up and start over
again.
Only after we have got it absolutely right - and then after
spending many hours submitting to directories, editors of ezines,
article announcement sites and individual webmasters - are we
rewarded, perhaps, with those hard-won non-reciprocal inbound
live hyperlinks.
But wait. There seems to be a problem. It appears that an
increasing number of people are quite happy to simply copy and
paste our work onto their own sites without a link back. Or they
don't bother to check if the link is 'live'.
That would be bad enough. But there are other people who print
our articles and then don't even bother to name the person who
wrote it.
But there's far worse: those people who print our article and then
announce to the world that they wrote it themselves! Some of
those even have the temerity to add the copyright sign next to
their name!
I may be being a bit too harsh. Perhaps these people don't
realize that they're doing anything wrong. After all, the Internet
was originally conceived as ownerless and based upon free and
open source information. And I can think of nothing more Public
Domain, in fact or in spirit, than the World Wide Web.
Yet just consider what it is these people are doing. They are
stealing other peoples' work and passing it off as their own. They
are effectively also stealing the web traffic that goes with it, the
traffic that our labours should be rewarding our websites with,
and diverting it to their own. This is blatant plagiarism. It just
should not happen. Theft is theft, in whatever medium.
I wrote an article a few months ago on Internet marketing for
small businesses. A search for the title of that article on Google
now returns 10,800 pages, so at least the title itself has been
reproduced that number of times and in that number of different
places. A search for a chunk of text from the middle of the article
returns 536 pages, which suggests that the article text has been
published in its entirety no fewer than 536 times. Great! So now I
have 536 inbound links from that one article! Wrong.
I looked at individual entries of the article and in a surprising
number of cases there were no backlinks at all. Also surprising -
and somewhat sickening - was the number of individuals who
wantonly attached their own names to my work.
I recently posted the same article to a fresh source of publishers.
I was astonished at the response of one editor of a well-known
directory who had rejected the article on the grounds that it was
not mine! She had seen the same piece on many other websites
under different names, she said, and it was not her policy to
publish work that had been produced using "cookie cutter"
techniques. I wrote back saying that it really was my own work,
citing the URL of SitePro News where it originally aired as that
day's headline feature. She apologized and was even good
enough to supply me with a list of names of people and sites
who had published it as their own. I'm so tempted to publish
their names here (perhaps I will on my blog; so watch out!) but
have decided that discretion should rule. For the moment, at
least.
But I think there is a clear message here. The fashion for article
writing and publishing for content and backlinks is going through
the roof at the moment. It's like a mini Internet boom all of its
own. And like any other boom it has attracted its own inevitable
pack of rat-racers, chancers, charlatans and cheats; shysters
who go for the shortcuts every time, while remaining quite
happy for other people to do their work for them.
For the record, the convention is this: distribute and publish the
article freely by all means. But it must be published in its entirety
and unedited, and MUST include the resource box with a live
hyperlink back to the author's site (or wherever the author wants,
for that matter).
Hey, now even my lawyer understands!
Next time I will publish their names gleefully, and be damned.
About the Author
Gordon Goodfellow is an Internet marketing practitioner who lives and works in London, UK. His workload has been greatly reduced with the help of the useful article publishing tool found at http://www.applied-web-marketing.com/aa.htm
Article Source: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/13526.html
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