Search Engine Marketing Group » Plagiarism

Did You Know That Unethical SEO Practices Could Hurt Your Reputation?

Heather Legg — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 11:58:05 +0000

With SEO so important to Google rankings, many sites are doing anything they can to boost their traffic and their rankings. However, unethical SEO practice, or black hat techniques, can actually hurt your online reputation and make your rankings fall quickly and even get your site penalized. It’s best to stay away from any kind of unethical SEO practice and keep a solid, clean reputation.

What Are Some Unethical SEO Practices to Stay Away From?

*Spun Content – This is taking a previously published article and rewording/rewriting it to say that it is original. However, it’s different than using an article as a source of information and writing your own from it; that’s okay with proper referencing and citing.

Article spinning, on the other hand, takes a well-written, informative article and substitutes words and rearranges sentences, often making the new article garbled and unreadable. If this shows up on your website, it looks a bunch of mish-mash and, though it may contain SEO keywords, will lower your ranking, as it’s basically garbage. Stay away from this!

*Duplicate Content – This one is pretty self-explanatory; it’s taking well-written material that someone else wrote, copying it, and calling it your own. Sure it has those valuable keywords, but guess what – it’s plagiarism. This can severely lower your rankings and your online reputation.

*Poor Quality Content/Over-Optimization (Nonsense Words) – Believe it or not, some website owners will fill their content with nonsense just to get their keywords in. This may have worked long ago and given them a somewhat high ranking because of the use of keywords, but not anymore. Now it will simply lower your ranking because no one wants to read a bunch of nonsense with keywords randomly stuck in. Google ranking techniques, formulas, and algorithms have become more advanced to detect this, and instead of raising your rankings, this one will put any site that does this at the bottom of the barrel.

*Invisible Text – This may be the strangest, most unethical one of all. When a site uses nonsense, keyword-stuffed material placed on their site in invisible text (using a color that blends with the rest of the site), it’s unethical. This one is a red flag to lowering ranking and penalization.

The above practices all fall under the Black Hat category, but there are other things that will hurt your reputation as well. These are some things that simply make you look bad.

*Bashing other sites – Just like your mom taught you not to talk about other people, don’t bash other sites. It just makes you look bad. It may not hurt your Google ranking per se, but it can hurt your online reputation. People may not want to do business with you or visit your site if you have a habit of talking smack about other sites – how do they know they’re not next?

*Giving False Information – Don’t say something just to draw customers in. This doesn’t help anyone, and when customers stop coming to your site, it will hurt. Don’t make promises you can’t keep or accusations that are unfounded. Keep your information up-to-date, honest and ethical, and your rankings will go up, instead of the other way around.

*Linking to Unethical Sites – Here’s another playground lesson – don’t hang out with the bad crowd. Sometimes you are judged on the crowd you keep, so if someone unethical links to you, don’t link back. Your customers should be able to trust the links you offer them, and if you take them bad places, they certainly won’t come back. Google can also detect this and lower your ranking. Your site is a reflection of you – keep it clean.

It’s tough out there in the world of ranking. Though it may be tempting sometimes to try something new, and perhaps not completely honest, don’t do it. The risk isn’t worth it, and you want your site to be something you can be proud of. You don’t want your customers to come to you for the wrong reasons; they won’t come back.

Google has become much more advanced in the way they rank and how it’s figured out, so what may have once worked will now only get your rankings lowered and your site possible penalized or even dis-banned.

Here’s one more playground lesson to go by – and this should cover it all – play nice. If you continually use original, creative, honest text and material and stay away from the unethical practices, your site will do just fine.

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Heather Legg

Heather Legg is a blogger who writes on small businesses, online reputation management services and staying true to yourself.

It May Almost Be 2009, But Duplicate Content Still Isn’t a Good Thing

Gerald Weber — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:40:36 +0000

Of all the topics that are discussed within the SEO blogosphere, one of the topics that creates the most controversy and disagreement is that of duplicate content. I think one of the reasons that there are so many different viewpoints surrounding this issue is because there are multiple ways that people define the phrase “duplicate content.”

Since I always believe in going straight to the source, let’s find out what Google has to say about duplicate content. According to Google, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” Now that we have Google’s definition of duplicate content, let’s look at what they have to say on the issue of how it can impact a website’s ranking:

“Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”

So, if you actually look at what Google is saying about duplicate conent, their stance is that you will only be explicitly penalized if they feel the duplicate content you are publishing is intended to deceive users or manipulate their search results. An example of this would be a Made for AdSense (MFA) website, which only contains content from other websites. The only purpose of a MFA website is to attract visitors who will click the AdSense ads.

If you are wondering how Google judges content and determines malicious duplicate content, this illustration from Elliance (which was published on Search Engine Land) should make that process clear to you:

Now, while you may think that I’m taking the “duplicate content doesn’t matter” stance, that is simply not true. Even if you aren’t publishing duplicate content with malicious intent, you may still run into problems. For example, I think Dave Feldman really hit the nail on the head in his post on SEL earlier this year, which was titled Got Duplicate Content? Don’t Let It Dilute Your SEO Efforts. The main focus of his post was that even when duplicate content isn’t published with malicious intent, it can still hurt your site’s rankings by diluting the weight of your links. Here’s the example he uses:

“Let’s say you have 30 external sites lined up to provide a link to your site; you just need to tell them what page to link to. If all 30 of those links point to the hiking boots page in the Men’s Clothing section, a good deal of link value will be passed to that page.

However, what happens if those 30 links get divvied-up across three different versions of that page, and are split between Men’s Clothing, Footwear, and Outdoors? Potentially, each page would only get 33 percent of that total link value. Clearly, 100 percent would be better.”

In addition to link dilution, the other major area where duplicate content can cause issues is with affiliate websites. As you may know, Google is getting more aggressive in their filtering of “thin affilaite websites” (which are affiliate websites with little original content). Not only can you run into problems with their algorithm, but if your website is hand reviewed by Google, a lack of original content could cause you to fail that review (and thus incur some form of a ranking penalty).

While the duplicate content debate will inevitably continue, at the end of the day, you can avoid a lot of potential headaches and worries by simply creating some form of content that is unique and useful to visitors.

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Gerald Weber

I founded Search Engine Marketing Group in December 2005. More recently I co-founded viralcontentbuzz.com. which is the free platform that helps bloggers generate REAL "social buzz" on their best content.

Combating Online Plagiarism

Gerald Weber — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:18:11 +0000

Plagiarism is a growing problem for webmasters these days, given the implications that plagiarism can have on a webmasters search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, this is an area that deserves some attention. Many webmasters spend hours upon hours writing content for websites, only to sometimes have it stolen or scraped by unscrupulous webmasters, who are either lazy or do not want to take the time to create their own content for whatever reason. Aside from the obvious fact that it is unethical for someone to copy original content and pass it off as their own, the implication that duplicate content can have on search engine optimization goes much deeper than that. Duplicate content can and probably will depreciate the search rankings for one or both of the sites with duplicate content.

It’s actually pretty easy to check for plagiarism if you know how to look. The best way to see if your content has been duplicated is to use a service like Copyscape. The other way you can check your website is to copy and paste a single and meaningful line from your website into Google and if that line appears on a search engine results page (SERP), you will see it. Google Alerts also scans the web to look for duplicate content periodically.

If you do manage to detect duplicate content from your website, here are a few steps you can and should take:

Contact the thief and politely ask them to remove the duplicate content.You can use Domaintools.com to help find out the contact information of someone who owns a domain. If it’s a major site, then you can attempt to contact the web master directly. After getting the contact info, you should attempt to contact the plagiarist and politely ask them to remove the duplicate content.
Contact the search engines, primarily Google, and file a DMCA complaint with them. (The idea is to ensure that the correct site is punished by Google. Also Google may remove the plagiarists’ site from their index entirely.)
Contact the plagiarists’ hosting company and file a DMCA complaint.The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires hosting companies to remove the plagiarized content. However, you must prove the content is stolen. They are not going to just take your word for it. You can easily prove who published the content to the web first by using internet archive.
You can follow up with appropriate legal action if number 1, 2 and 3 do not get the desired results.

Interestingly, checking for plagiarism does not seem to rank high on most webmasters’ lists but it should actually be at the top of a webmasters’ to-do list, given the negative implications it can have on search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.Similar Posts: