I recently read a guest post on here by Oliver, who was getting infuriated by other people stealing the content he had written and posting it on their site. This is an issue I have come across and even written about before and I wanted to respond with my own guest post on this site to explain why I personally don’t care about content theft and why others shouldn’t either.
Google Knows It’s Duplicate
Five years ago Google was pretty good at establishing what content is unique and what content was duplicate, and it’s only got better since. It looks at loads of factors to determine who should be credited with true ownership of the copy and simply removes scraped versions from its index or drops them down the rankings below the original. In all my years of blogging I have never had scraped content ranking above my original versions, and the chance of this ever happening will continue to get slimmer.
I Get Backlinks
I actually like my content being scraped because more often than not I gain backlinks because of it. I always include some internal links in my blog posts, not only to help internal link power but also to ensure that if my content does get scraped, I stand a chance of getting a nice anchor text backlink to my site. Of course a lot of content thieves will strip the links about, by many use auto scraping robots which leave the links in. Happy days.
I Get Traffic
Not only do I get backlinks from others taking my content, but I also stand a chance of getting some traffic out of it as well. There is a possibility that some people will find my content on someone else’s site, either by browsing around their site or by following links on referring sites to the stolen content. Now, I tend to write about topics closely related to what my site is about (as most people do), so if people find the content and then search for more information about what I am writing about, there is a strong chance they will land right on my site. Let me explain using an example.
1. An internet user finds my article about ‘The Latest Snowboards on The Market’ on another site whilst browsing around it.
2. They are interested by what they are reading and decide to search in Google the name of one of the snowboards or just the term “snowboards” in fact.
3. Because I rank well for terms related to the article, there is a chance I will gain even more search engine traffic.
These are the main reasons I don’t think you should get worked up about people stealing your precious content and instead you should be flattered and happy you might get something out of it.
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Why I Couldn’t Care Less About Content Theft is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires