So you wrote a fantastic article, or better yet, a witty Tweet.
You don’t receive exposure on your own might, but the newly anointed news juggernaut Huffington Post picks it up, puts your tweet in its own unique page, wraps HuffPo ads around it, and calls it their own (they probably give you attribution credit).
This is an issue because Huffington Post routinely ranks for major news stories and trending topics in EVERYTHING. Yet, their own unique content is thin.
Why does Google allow them to dominate for what is essentially duplicate/stolen content?
I’m not the only one who wonders whether Huffington post has great writers or great SEOs. Some go so far as to call them a content farm.
I can understand why it’s frustrating. The small bloggers write a great article about some current event. The blogger can’t really get the attention they deserve, but HuffPo steals the content, gets all the traffic, ranks #1 (with some limited spillover benefit for the author).
Not best situation for the web/Google results. I think the issue also speaks to Google’s inability to control their results page, and also points to a weaknesses in their PageRank ranking algorithm.
Google is really poor with crediting the original creator. THey are really good at ranking content based on relative strength. Thus, HuffPo ‘borrowed’ article > lowly bloggers who wrote article.
They’ll rank HuffPo every time.
Solution? Let’s say that you wrote a great article on a new blog and HuffPo decides to use it (articles, tweet, pictures, doesn’t matter).
If Google wants to rank the HuffPo page because the overall strength of that website fine, but why not have some type of artificial pull on the original source?
I’m not saying my idea is unique, I just was musing about it today.
If you wrote an article that shines because HuffPo ‘stole’ it why doesn’t Google simple figure out that the source is the ‘original content’ and rank it #1 (thanks of course to HuffPo attribution) and then rank HuffPo #2?
That would a) make HuffPo think twice of stealing borrowing content, and would reward the original creators.
Just a thought, probably already in the works by brains smarter than I.
Huffington Post is a content farm, because they just stole content from my blog, didn’t give me any credit, repackaged it with a few other things, and put it on HuffPost.
What’s worse is that HuffPost has teamed up with Red Room.com which has tons of bloggers. I received a solicitation from the Senior Editor of RedRoom to submit content to “Gina,” an Editor at HuffPost. They said that HuffPost was looking for new story pitches and bloggers, and I went for the bait.
Two weeks later I saw my repackaged content on HuffPost with no attribution, no thanks, nothing. Outright theft. Don’t trust HuffPost or RedRoom.com.
A. Cobet, blogger
A
There are ways to protect yourself from theft, the first being filing for copyright which in the US is relatively cheap. Here is the link for more info.
http://www.copyright.gov/eco/
This is the only real recourse you have. If you have the copyright you can sue successfully for tens of thousands per article.