This is the Year of Original Content

I’m working on my annual Things I Want Gone from the Web article and I’ve personally designated this “The Year of Original Content.” We’re done playing around with feed scraping and autoblogging.

The blog echo chamber effect of someone blockquoting and linking the same content as a recommendation, echoing through the web without original content, is a beginner’s mistake. Don’t do it. Always add your original voice and content to your recommendations, telling your readers why it is important to leave this blog and go to another, then come back for more.

Google took action to penalize duplicate content within a site and between sites, and added bonus points for original and unique, appropriate and relevant keywords around links, especially link lists, rewarding original content providers with nicer PageRank scores. Similar actions are being taken by other major search engines, directories, and legitimate content aggregators.

As a serious blogger, you’ve learned the lesson and stay focused on creating original content. You link to other people’s content appropriately, taking care to protect their copyrights and not confuse your reader’s, putting other people’s content in blockquotes with clearly indicated links and credits.

For scammers, scrapers, and plagiarists, other people’s content has turned into a major money-maker as they use other people’s content for financial gain and misdirection.

The blogosphere has long fought against scrapers and spam blogs, those using your original content without permission. Yet, black hat SEO villains continue to promote quick schemes to get-rich-with-blogs and auto-blog and auto-scraper tools, and people fall for them every day.

They don’t work and it’s up to us to stop them. Help me declare this the year of original content.

The Year of Original Content

I want to declare this is the year to honor original content. Sites like WordPress Direct and other WordPress scam sites which offer tools for autoblogging and feed scraping are old news. Unwanted. Unnecessary. Wasteful. Clutter. Yuk.

Let’s make this the year to crush black hat WordPress blogs, to put Blogger/Blogspot abuse by spammers, sploggers, and scrapers our of our misery. Search engines are tired of the copyright violations requests that flood their inboxes and clog up the web with redundancies. We’re tired of finding spam blogs in our search results. I believe they are going to hit harder on autobloggers and scrapers – as should we.

If you are a splogger, spammer, scrapper, scammer, or black hat SEO fan, consider yourself warned.

See Also

Old Blogging Sites That We Thought were Gone

We’re going to take action, every one of us who publish original content on the web. We are going to say NO to those who don’t ask first and use our content without permission.

This is the year to celebrate original content. Original thoughts. The unique voices will rise up, with everyone having their say on the issues, letting their voices be heard through their blogs and social media tools. We will take the conversation out in many directions, each direction adding to the conversation, not echoing redundancies.

Bye-bye get-rich-quick blogs. You are unwanted. We’re going to drown you out with our unique, original content this year.

In the next article on The Year of Comment Spam, you’ll learn what you can do to join the cause and fight back against the abusers of original content.