Duplication of my blog content - will Google kill me?

No - but it might give the thief ownership of your stuff

I’ve noticed posts that hit the right places in Google’s natural search results can suddenly disappear off the radar without explanation (there’s never an explanation, let’s face it).

This morning, however, while looking for a vanished post, I did a blog search on the key phrase in question and found this:

Duplicate blog contents

That got my Columbo head going.

The top one is our site but the summary in Google’s index is only the last lines of the post in question… and the post in question has vanished from Google’s natural search results.

The bottom one is my post in a spammers site - stolen and used as Google bait for their ad-sense spam. The summary is the full summary.

Without knowing what’s actually going on inside Google, a layman’s guess is that Google has decided that the spammers own the indexed version of the post, not me.

The result is that they hold the full page title and header summary for my post indexed against their domain. The fact that it doesn’t come up in a Google web search suggests that the thieving site either has no page rank or is otherwise penalised.

Make no mistake. When Google created their search engine, they could have put it to use for good or evil. AdWords could be argued to be a social evil - given what it does to the body of information globally. Ad-Sense (where you and I get paid for hosting Google ads on our ’sites’) is definately evil.

Think about it. It’s the ultimate, lowest-common-denominator, ‘get-rich-quick’ trash. What else would any rational person expect other than an explosion of fake sites, automatically updated with other people’s content earning invisible spammers money on click-throughs.

We are in danger of reaching a point where none of this works because the ad revenue model is too attractive to too many sleazy people who. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s the ideal ‘work at home’ opportunity.

However, if this ‘advertising-shapes-knowledge’ model doesn’t change, we are all - and I make no apologies for this - screwed and the online world will become a wasteland.

August 12, 2008 | Filed Under GRRRR!!!, business insight 

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