Make Money from Blogs » Violation

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 15 – Avoid paid links

ashish — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:57:07 +0000

In the previous post (Advantage of links to SEO), I covered the importance of links as a part of a SEO strateg. Links are very important to get your blog ranked highly, as long as those links are from good sources, since links from trashy sites are likely to drag you down.
In this post, I will be looking at what are some of the problems associated with a strategy of trying to increase your SEO rating by buying links or using such programs, such that search engines associate you with trying to subvert the normal method of getting people to rate your site by linking to it, and accordingly penalize you. Let me put out a few links and blog posts that convey how serious this is (and remember, if you are using such a scheme, there is a very good chance that the folks at Google Search also know about it, and if they detect you using it, then they are likely to penalize you for it).
Google Help on Paid Links (link)

A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.

Thus, if you are having a paid link to your site, then be sure that it has a ‘nofollow’ tag associated with it; but then that does not help your site in terms of PageRank, so might as well not do it.
Google Help on Link Schemes (link)

The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

What does this mean ? It means that if you indulge in buying or selling of links that do not have ‘nofollow’ tags (which pass PageRank), then Google can reduce the PageRank of your site, and for sites that are dependent on search engines to provide the traffic to them, this can be disastrous. If you do indeed face such a penalty, you can remove such links and apply again, but everything takes time. Google has implemented this for many sites that were selling such links.
To make it clear again, Google is worried about links and states this as a policy in terms of what to avoid: “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”
So, be very careful about using paid links.

Ad: Try out SEO Elite, to give your sites a huge boost in search engine rankings

Does having multiple items in a feed defy Adsense terms ?

ashish — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:13:40 +0000

If you have read about Adsense, you would also have read about how Google ensures the terms and conditions as well as the Program Policies enforced for Adsense. If you contradict those, you can be sure that either Google will ensure those policies themselves, or kick you out of the program. So, for example, Google has a policy about only showing 3 text units per blog, and the Adsense code itself ensures that will happen – so even though the code may be implemented in more than 3 locations, the ad will only show up in the first 3 places where the code is present.
Google can also kick out people when they are indulging in click fraud, which is also against their terms and conditions. So, if you ask people to click on your ads, or put ads next to images which may cause people to think that the ad explains the image, then Google is likely to give you a warning, or kick you out.
So, when Google rolled out the Adsense in feeds program, a lot of people have a similar query; each feed can have more than 1 items within the feed, and if the ad shows up more than 3 times, will this be against the policies. Google has responded that this will not be a problem (read more at the Google blog)

Many publishers have asked the question “Since feed items often get displayed with many feed items on a single web page, can using AdSense for feeds jeopardize the status of my AdSense account?” The answer is no. Having three ad units per page is a product specific policy for AdSense for content.
In essence, the variable ways in which feed items are displayed are controlled and optimized automatically by the AdSense for feeds application and the choices you make as a publisher in your AdSense account when configuring your AdSense for feeds ad units. This means we may automatically suppress ad impressions when we detect there are too many feed ad units being displayed, resize ads based on the size and length of your content, and adjust the ads that are displayed based on the device in which the feed is being read.

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.

Stop Plagiarism: Find the name of the hosting provider

ashish — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:59:42 +0000

Let us consider that you have managed to detect that somebody is copying your content (either by directly taking the content from your blog, or by reading the content from your feed). Now, you need to take steps to get them to stop doing this hosting, or atleast start a discussion with them, so that you can decide on next steps (whether they will change their method of copying so that it meets with your approval, and gives you a link back to your blog, getting you some more traffic).
Now, consider that you are not able to get in touch with the owners of the other blog since they do not have contact details, and sending emails to addresses such as admin@ or owner@, etc do not get a response. This gets you more determined to actually try and get the other blog to take down your content, and you need to work out a way to do so. One way of escalation is to contact the hosting company of the other site to inform that they are hosting content that may be copyrighted, and they should stop hosting all such content. Now, hosting companies normally have policies regarding copyrighted content (it helps that legally a hosting company can be held not responsible for copyrighted content if they have been shown to have taken some action when it has been pointed out to them).
Now, how do you actually detect the hosting company for the other site. Well, a simple solution is to use this site called http://www.whoishostingthis.com/. You just enter the name of the other site that you want to report, and WhoIsHostingThis will provide you with the name of the hosting service. It works, since I tried out a few other sites.
From the site:

Are your hosting results 100% accurate?
As far as we know, there is no way to provide 100% accurate results. However, we use several data sources to find out who is hosting a website, including feedback from users. You can help by reporting bad results for us to investigate.

Ad: HyperVRE — Viral Adsense Software

The Complete Guide to Google Advertising: Including Tips, Tricks, & Strategies to Create a Winning Advertising Plan (Paperback)