spinning content-Google Slap?
Curation or plagiarism? I am trying to work out what is what, all comments and views welcome.
Do you ever feel that you are being led up an alley?
I keep abreast of my niche which is sous vide cooking, more on that another time...
Google alerts are great to keep up to date with the latest news. I set mine to the "highest quality".
However, I came across this one "manually" AKA scanning the papers on-line in the morning.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2604019/Kitchen-wars-Celebrity-chefs-turning-dinner-parties-cut-throat-battlegrounds-friends-spend-200-time-trying-cook-other.html
This is the article that first caught my eye in a UK tabloid/broadsheet hybrid, of questionable ethics IMO but swash-buckling journalism of which this is not an example.
I had to go through most of it, to discover the external link to the source it was essentially re-purposing content/ripping off/spinning from (choose your own variant.. Which is over here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/10764332/Inspired-by-TV-cooks-the-200-dinner-party-is-the-latest-battleground.html
Reading both of them led me to the same "feeling place" if you like, they both tasted vanilla, and I think they missed an angle in relation to sous vide cooking but that is my prejudice- I would have expected a less lazy rip-off attempt by putting some different "value-add" onto the original article, but maybe deadlines were tight...
The source for this story is limited research and an individual who is quoted in each article.
The quote was attributed, and the rest of it is simply spun to death: different sentence ordering, adjectives, verbs and so forth...and the quoted element will evidently escape a Google penalty- or maybe there are just different rules for the big kids?
I am not sure if my job just got easier or I am confounded by how ignorant the bots and Google Algorithm is...The line is so fine, I can't see the blighter.
Best wishes, Andy
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What the "big guy" gets a wink for, the "little guy" does the same thing and gets a hard knock on the head. Go figure!
Ade
There is always a fine line separating the various shades of grey in which we live our lives... it just depends on how you look at it. I agree that the person that 're-purposed' the original article should have found a new, more interesting angle to write from within the original article.
Writers have been doing this for years, and unless you were the first person to pen a particular idea, your version of the information is simply going to be a copy of theirs written in a slightly different way.
I guess my point is... there are some people that will simply take someone's words, change them up just enough to not get sued for plagiarism, and then use it as their own. And the algorithms used by Google are probably only looking for exact copy and paste... thus no penalty marker thrown.
Hope I didn't miss your original point by to much,
J P
don't think you did....it seems as though the larger sites get more leeway than the little guy, and they are regularly hacking stuff off the others, running spoilers and getting briefings from and access to the same major players.
Social media has a large role to play in helping the little guy get noticed- we should champion the little guy in our shares for sure..
I completely agree... money, power and connections get them the larger section of the playing field.... but we have the numbers, and social media is not only leveling that playing field... it's giving us a bigger share of it!!
I always try to help and support the little guy.... they will be the ones helping to push you across the finish line.
J P
Hi Andy , it must be like you say, newspapers have been copying off each other since they were written on papyrus, so a long time before the web was even thought of, Google must exempt large publishers and it is only us that have to tread the fine line.
I do think the big boys get a lot of leeway - Google loves big brands, probably because a lot of them spend a lot of money with them and I don't think it's a coincidence that they are finishing top of the organic results too. Pick a topic, for example recipes, and you will find BBC Food on page one for every single food recipe you care to search for.
So as not to make a fool of myself I just searched for three recipes at random out of curiosity and guess what - BBC Food was first for two of them, second for the other one. You're telling me everything on their site is 100% unique or better than everything else out there? There must be an awful lot of similarities between their recipes and other, similar ones.
As for the fine line it's so difficult to avoid. I'm not sure what else we are supposed to do. Try writing a unique product review on, say, a mobile phone - my sector. Unless you have access to every model you want to write about you can only use existing content and specs to whip up an article. After writing 80 similar articles it gets more and more difficult and for most people, whatever they are writing about there isn't a lot you can do except to reuse the information gleaned from existing content and put your own spin on it. The problem is, whatever your niche is, somebody somewhere has probably said it all before and you have to put your own version into writing but there are only so many ways of doing that. How many ways can you say "Fantastic camera"?
this pretty much mirrors my thoughts and struggles- it is good to know I am not paranoid- at least no more than I usually am..
Well I have to admit Andy I ask myself every day if I'm doing the right thing by even bothering at all taking on a major niche. It feels like I'm "p***ing into the wind" sometimes but I'm basing my plan on the assumption that the more content I have the better it is going to rank. Trouble is it is clear that I am going to need an awful lot more yet to make any kind of impact.
My general technique is to read three or four of the most popular reviews, open a site which lists all the specs, and write my own review as a combination of all those but try to make them as unique as possible.
I check some of the search results using a particular keyword phrase from time to time and I seem to be creeping up in the rankings, for most of the products anyway. Given that a lot of my reviews have been around for over 6 months now it must be working, i.e. I'm not getting penalised although one has bombed from 41st to 126th so I'll have to take a look at that.
It's worth remembering I only got a lot of them ranked at all by filling in those meta description boxes in All In One SEO. One other thing of note, I haven't checked this in any depth yet but the shorter reviews of 600-800 words seem to fare better than the longer ones!
Mark we are all welcome, you especially- I have watched your knowledge come on, and hope that none of us is deterred from having an opinion. Thanks for commenting have a great Irish day! Andy
The thing to us is to try and avoid doing it ourselves. It's such a soft option and tempting when there is nothing happening up top and it's
a meal pass to a journo. I think it's common.
Hello Andy, not really sure what to say. It is a fine line, seems that is almost always the answer, and I get tired of hearing it!
I think it is sometimes the mushroom syndrome for the common people- we are kept in the dark and fed b*llsh*t...trying to LOL, but not quite making it
Hi Andy,
Being in the publishing business since 30 years, I can confirm that this happens every day, every hour around the world. Since we have internet, everything is available to everyone. But even before with the news agencies, you did find the same article in different newspapers.
So, nothing new on the copy front.
it is just that there appear to be 2 different sets of rules, as coolcity perceives as well
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No I did not mean to offend you,you have been a great source of help and you are very switched on regards here.I just did not fully understand things there,thanks for the compliment about my learning curve.
no offence taken Mark, we are all on different paths which lead to the same destination (we hope) it is part of what makes it interesting...Andy