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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 31 – Observing copyright law

ashish — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:07:39 +0000

Observing copyright law mean not seem relevant to a post on what is good Search Engine Optimization. And you might be thinking that with the need to get fresh content, what is wrong on taking some content from other sources and modifying them slightly in order to get fresh content for your site. However, keep in mind that Copyright Infringement can have serious legal issues, and if you are challenged, this can have pretty bad results for your site, and also on your rankings with search engine. So here goes some layman advice on Copyright Law (remember that for specific advice and queries on such a critical topic, you will need to consult a lawyer or expert and not depend on posts like this one). Here goes:
- You are allowed to quote sections from other posts or sites if these are meant for positive or negative acclaim, since this is covered under free speech
- However, for the above point, there are limitations. If you copy the main point of the other site or article, or copy huge sections of the other article, then it is beyond the fair use right and you are technically doing what some US courts have ruled as copyright violation
- There are many sites that allow the use of their material freely and you can use them in any way; however, keep in mind that just because a site or any kind of media does not have an explicit copyright, they are free to copy. Sites that allow free copy should have an explicit point stating so.
- You can even use company logos or names in your posts, subject to the same condition as above; you need to use them for acclaim or review; but you cannot use them for any kind of commercial purpose without approval from the owners of the company logos or names
- Quoting additional material from other sites beyond review fair use needs approval from the owners of the copyright
- There can be many different kinds of copyright notices, so you need to check about the kind of copyright notices that are present on the site from where you are planning to get content to ensure that you are doing the right thing
- If people come after you alleging copyright infringement, then you can be in serious trouble; especially if they come after all your hosting service or going after search engines where your site is ranked
- Hence, be very careful about the type of content you are using from other sites, do not look at this content as a way of filling your content needs; only use content under fair use

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 4

ashish — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:28 +0000

In the previous post (Content is king for blogging), I had talked about various tips for using content to increase your search engine rankings. In this post, I will talk more about how having duplicate content on your blog (copying content from another blog) can lead to penalties for your blog, and what are the steps you should do to ensure that you don’t suffer from penalties.
- First of all, if you are writing content that is not duplicate, many of your readers who would have wanted to get some quality information (and who would have already read similar information on other sites will quickly skip over and may not come back if they see this happening on a regular basis)
- Search engines also want to ensure that their users do not get the same type of content in their search results, and hence will penalize sites which have content that are duplicate of each other. Search engines have complicated algorithms that are able to distinguish as to which blog was the original content creator, and which blogs have copied the content.
Read more about it at this blog (duplicate content penalty)

If your content was copied from another source, the search engines will not list those pages or give you any credit for that content since it was indexed already from another site. Does this mean it is alright to do and I will not get a penalty? No it is not, consider it a self imposed penalty on your own real estate website as those pages will never be indexed, thus a waste of your time and a waste of page space on your website.

- There are many cases where you want to syndicate your content to other sites. For example, you would certainly want to write an article on other sites that are highly ranked to get some incoming link credit (will explain this technique later), but how do you avoid a duplicate content penalty by having this same article on your site as well. There are 2 ways of doing this – You can either send a shorter version of your content for syndication, or you can create 2 different versions for syndication and for your own blog. This will help you to avoid the duplicate content penalty
- If you do have duplicate content on your site, then it is very much possible that aggrieved content owners who had the original content on their sites come after you. They can issue you cease and desist letters, or can actually file cases against you with your service providers or hosting companies. So, in addition to search engines ignoring this content, you can actually get into hassles with this content.
- However, you are not prohibited from quoting other blogs if you appreciate the blog or want to post a critique of the blog. You would need to post a link to the blog post which you are referring, and can post a small section of the post length while either praising or criticizing the post. You should make sure that you are not copying the central idea of the post, or posting huge chunks of the post.

As usual, you will hear more in the next post about content, SEO and related stuff.

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Cross-domain content duplication

ashish — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:40:49 +0000

It is pretty well known that content duplication is a problem in terms of search engine penalties. I used to search a lot about whether having the same content on multiple sites was a problem, and there was conflicting information on different sites about whether this is a problem or not. I initially read on some sites that this was not a problem, but then I read on Google’s blog that they did not really prefer to appreciate people who tried to hoodwink their search engines by having the same content appear on their search in different positions. In fact, if Google determined that this was done deliberately, then they would apply penalties. So, this would mean that if I placed my content on 2 sites and did so consistently, Google would consider that to be deliberate.
However, I read this post on the Google blog (link to post) where they explained how to make the cross-domain duplicate blog posting work, but for specific cases where the user may be trying to make the transition between one domain to another domain. This is still not a carte bache to merrily duplicate content across different sites. Some of the steps that are advised is that the user is advised to select the preferred domain, as well as handle the duplication of content within the site, and most importantly, use the 301 server side redirects.

Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file. Don’t forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools.
There are situations where it’s not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel=”canonical” link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel=”canonical” link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.

Detecting plagiarism on your WordPress blog – using the Tracer tool

ashish — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:09:36 +0000

The previous post talked about using this tool if you have a Blog hosted on Google’s Blogger, but what if you have a WordPress account ? Well, this tool works for blogs running on WordPress, and numerous others (Ning network, Typepad, WebsiteWorks.com). It is fairly easy to add this to your WordPress blog, since WordPress has a plugin structure that easily allows the addition of more functionality. You can refer the following site (link) for installation instructions. Basically, this functionality requires adding code to the template, and just before the tag.
So, go for it. The code is setup to add a small link back to your site when they copy your content so that when they add the content to their site, the link gets added. This link will eventually get caught and you can then detect that your content is being coped elsewhere, and then you can take further action to remove the stolen content.

Protect your Blogger post – Use Tracer to add your own link back to the copied content

ashish — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:56:18 +0000

It remains difficult to protect your content. You can take measures such as adding a Javascript that will prevent people from being able to right-click, or which will prevent people from being able to select content from your blog, but there are ways around that. Such controls do prevent some people from being able to take your content, but there will be people who are more technologically competent, and they will be able to beat your controls.
The method to be used is to detect when somebody is stealing your content, and then confront that person. The main point in this approach is to find out when somebody is stealing your content through the use of tools such as Google Alert, through some smart searching through using Google, and through some other plugins. However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger interface, it will get more difficult to use such measures. One such tool however that you can use is called Tracer, and can be downloaded from this link.
The way that this tool works is that you can set it up on your Blogger blog through a HTML/Javascript gadget, and then the tool will add a back link to your site when somebody selects content from your site and copies it. There will be always some people who will notice the back link, but for those where a tool is used to copy, or when somebody is not careful enough, the back link will let you easily detect when somebody has copied content from your site.