Image Credit: copyright
The following post has been written by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, more of his articles can be found at his blog.
There are a number of ways to protect your blog from piracy, but there is a tangible cost no matter what you do, and sometimes letting them steal it actually helps you in the long-run.
The first method of protection is filing DMCA requests with Google, other search engines, and perhaps the host of the site scraping your content. But honestly this can be tough to keep up with if it happens over and over again, and is probably a poor strategy given that the internet is truly global.
An easier method of protecting copyright is to simply publish partial feeds instead of whole RSS feeds. This means that while an RSS scraper may steal your content, they will not be getting much of it from you, and what they get should not be able to harm your rankings.
The third strategy is to use their content theft as an SEO & link building strategy. If you frequently reference your older blog posts in your current blog posts (using absolute links - not relative links) that means that the scraper sites will be providing free links to your content. Over time as you build up a real audience and your authority you should *usually* outrank the scrappers for your own content. A friend of mine named Joost de Valk created a Wordpress extension which automatically adds links to your site in the footer of your RSS. If you have pages that are hard to build links to and hundreds or thousands of scrappers are linking to them that could help boost your rankings for related keywords. If you use an extension like RSS Footer make sure you mix up your anchor text and footer occasionally in case anyone trained their bot to strip it out AND to help keep your anchor text profile a bit more natural.
Copyright is increasingly irrelevant each day, and being unknown is a bigger risk for most bloggers than getting outranked is. If you really push eventually you should get credit for most (if not all) of your content. In the next year or two if they have not yet solved the RSS scrapper issue I believe the major search engines may launch tools to help you register your content by submitting it to them before publishing it so they know the source.
Many people copied my ebook and distributed it across the web widely without my permission. My three solutions to that were to either encrypt it with DRM software, stop selling information, or break information into smaller pieces and keep adding premium content and sell it as a membership site basis. Instead of giving up or crippling my product I decided to launch an online training program and back it up with a community forum that turns it into more of an experience rather than just a commodity piece of information.
Posted in SEO News By Aaron Wall.
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March 21st, 2008
Although I do not currently use read more tags on this blog one of my clients does. I decided that it was a waste of PageRank to have the more tags followed and went about finding some information on how add nofollow to the links. But I could not find any, after a good couple of hours of tweaking I figured out how to do it, here is a quick tutorial:
More Tag Nofollow Fix for Versions 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3
You need to make changes to the post template file in the WP includes folder. On line 124 you will see the following line of code:
$output .= ‘ <a href=”‘. get_permalink() . “#more-$id\” class=\”more-link\”>$more_link_text</a>”;
You need to add the nofollow tag just before the link text. Simply replace the existing line of code with this one:
$output .= ‘ <a href=”‘. get_permalink() . “#more-$id\” class=\”more-link\” rel=\”nofollow\”>$more_link_text</a>”;
Once you save the file all of your more tag links will be nofollowed.
I do not think that this will make a huge amount of difference to your search engine rankings, but PageRank is precious and it could help prevent some of your posts being dropped from the search results.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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March 19th, 2008
Image Credit: earth from space
A couple of weeks ago Barry reported that Google’s country specific weights may be getting stronger. Some changes have been made and one thing is obvious, UK sites have had their rankings reduced on Google.com for many commercial phrases.
One thing that seems to have gone un-noticed is that around the same time the Google webmaster central set geographic tool began to work.
Webmasters who’s sites are hosted outside the of the UK can now have their sites rank properly on Google UK (including pages from the UK), simply by changing the geographic target via Google webmaster tools.
I know of at least one site that this is working properly for, the site is hosted in the US and it has been set up so that the UK sub directory of the site now shows up on pages from the UK.
If webmasters with international sites leverage this properly it could have a huge impact on the amount of traffic they receive. Certain sites that spring to mind are ones like Dmoz and BOTW.org, these sites could now have their UK sub directories show up and rank properly on UK only Google.
Also this is not just a UK thing, webmasters can now have the relevant sub-directories/domains of their international sites show up on country specific searches worldwide. Can you imagine how much more traffic that would mean for Dmoz if this was set up correctly?
To make this work you need to have a general top level domain like a .com, .net or a .org, with the sub directories of your site specifically targeting individual countries, you then need to claim the different sections as separate sites and set the relevant geographic target for each one.
This is supposed to take about 2-3 months to kick in, but it could take much longer depending on the size of the site and the amount of links and PageRank etc.
The tool is still not perfect but this is a large step in the right direction. Congratulations to the webmaster central team and thanks to Richard for some good info.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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February 12th, 2008
If you have trackbacks enabled on your blog you have most probably had to deal with trackback spam at some point.
Most of the time I just delete the spam trackbacks and move on, but this morning I received one from what appeared to be a very legitimate web design company.
Surely these guys are not blackhats I am thinking, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
The email I sent to the web design company:
“Hi,
My blog was just spammed by someone pointing a text link to your URL - using trackback spam:
http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/2008/01/03/
the-magic-seo-beans/#comment-1023
I wouldn’t normally contact the poeple who spam me but you look like a genuine company so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Trackback spamming is against the search engine guidelines and it is a very fast way to get your site banned from Google.
If you know nothing about this, then let me know and I will see if I can find out some more info for you. If you are paying a company to do this for you, drop them and drop them fast. If you are using some software to do this, stop using it.
Plenty of people who are a lot less forgiving then me would just forward this straight on to Google’s webspam team.
Best Regards
David Eaves”
The web design company’ response:
“Dear David,
I would like to thank you for taking the time to email me and bringing this to my attention.
I have started using a search engine company who I will be getting rid of as I received a similar email to the one you sent yesterday.
May I ask what your company charges for SEO services, we would like to do well for the phrase ‘Web Design’
Kind Regards,
Colin”
So as it turns out I may be getting an SEO or link building contract, thanks to trackback spam.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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January 30th, 2008
Image Credit: more magic on the web
I was checking up on my competition yesterday on Google, as I do pretty regularly, and I came across a website, ranked in the #12 position for the phrase ‘SEO’. Because I had never seen the site before it aroused my curiosity and I began doing a bit of investigating.
I checked the back-links and the site had around 20,000 going to the homepage - which is a healthy amount - but when I started checking the sites that were linking to it I could not find any links on their pages; almost as if the sites linking to it were cloaked. I continued my investigation, Googled the URL and came across this really funny thread started by a Mr David McSweeney. Now, make sure that you don’t have any drinks near your keyboard for this, the thread is basically a copy of a discussion that David had with one of the companies sales girls. It is possibly one of the funniest SEO sales pitches I have ever heard; being a former employee of Iomart, I have heard a lot.
Sales Girl - “A couple of years ago we identified the magic 4 points which google uses to rank sites. We approached google about this and they said to us…”
Google - “Oh, you are right. There is nothing we can do about this for 15-20 years and we’ll let you away with it, as long as you only do it for one company for each key phrase.
“Because of this magic formula we can guarantee you a top 10 position for the keyphrase ’straighteners’ on the main google index.”
David - “I am assuming what you are offering is a link building service? Not really that impressive, considering that we are already 22nd for the keyword ’straighteners’ and there are only 176,000 results. Surely a few good quality links would get us up there?”
Sales Girl - “No, we do things that you have never even heard of. Only we can guarantee you this ranking.”
David - “I targeted the keyphrase ‘hair products’, which has 2,860,000 results (276,000 with the quotes) and we are 6th in the Google index. I did not employ the use of any magic beans or potions for this ranking.”
Sales Girl - “No, only ourselves and 4 other companies in the world know how to manipulate the rankings.”
David - “Manipulate? So what you are doing is black hat then? Google don’t allow anyone to manipulate their rankings.”
Sales Girl - “Yes, but they told us they couldn’t do anything about it and as long as we don’t saturate the market, it’s OK.”
David - “But surely if you told them what you do, the first thing they would do is make sure Mr Cutts and his web spam team gets right on to it to fix the problem?”
Sales Girl - “No, they won’t have the technology for 15/20 years.”
You have got to give her 10/10 for effort, but the company’s magic formula appears to be using hundreds, if not thousands, of cloaked sites for links. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this and I do not have any problem with black hat SEO, just so long as the clients know what they are getting and the risks involved; this, however, does not seem to be the case.
Around 3 hours after I started my investigation the site completely disappeared from Google for the phrase ‘SEO’ (you will have to take my word for it that is was there), however it is still rocking Yahoo! - and in position 5.
I may have some of my facts wrong about the link building techniques that this company is using, but I am pretty sure that they are well outside of the search engine guidelines, perhaps one of you blackhats could let me know if I am right.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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January 3rd, 2008
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