Google will act to remove web pages that rank highly, that use copyrighted material without permission. One of the more popular tactics for a beginner Search Engine Optimiser, is to copy material that already ranks well. Apart from the ethical dimensions of copying someone elses’ work, there’s this:
The technique of copying already well ranking content is partly a misunderstanding about why search engines rank anything. It’s actually possible to have a page rank highly, that Google hasn’t yet crawled. Examples are difficult, as they’d rely on exposing client details, but if you consider the two following outlines, you’ll understand a little more about why breaching copyright is both dangerous for your business, and a not very effective technique:
- Google bombing, or link bombing, has ranked pages for keywords that aren’t on the page at all
- Uncrawled pages can rank, showing just the anchor text and the link
The big thing to walk away from this story is that copying copyrighted material isn’t a good idea, because it doesn’t entirely give you what you think you’re getting, and may get you in trouble. Better to go write some genuine material, than steal it.
Rewriting Content
An alternative is to use artificial intelligence to rewrite the copy. I stumbled into a rewritten article from the Merjis blog a few days ago:
This example is probably using a simple technique of thesaural replacement, rather than any serious linguistic tools. The technique renders the text of the original article – the title is correctly preserved as “Discussion Forums and Customer Service” – as high entropy gibberish. These site scrapers went another step, though, and had a straight copy of the article, too.
Very much on the black hat side of SEO, I recommend clients to stay away from this sort of activity, not just because of the legal and search engine optimisation risks, but because most companies that have or should have customers, have more useful ways to interact with their customer and prospect audiences. Finding scraped content on a prospective clients’ site is a huge red flag for the account.
If you have a real brand, it is much, much better to focus on what your customer and your prospect needs to know, and engage them properly, than run the risk of tripping search engine filters, bans or public exposure.
