Rhody Trader

If you’re a blogger, web author, or someone looking to do that sort of thing, a couple of quick points.

First, if you mention someone in one of your posts, spell their name right. A fellow blogger recently lifted some of my stuff and didn’t even get my name right when saying who’d written it. It’s like the old saying goes: There’s no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right.

Second, if you use someone’s content or refer to it, have the common courtesy to provide a link back to the original source. A lot of stuff out there is copyrighted. If you just grab it without permission you could have the author giving you grief. Since links are a type of currency among websites, if you at least provide one back to the original source the original poster will probably let it slide, and may even be happy.

Third, keep in mind that the search engines (like Google) can penalize sites for duplicating content. That means if you grab someone else’s content, especially if they have a higher authority than you, you could actually see you own search ranking reduced. Not good if you want traffic.

I’ve already commented in an earlier post on how pointless I think it is to just cut and past a whole article or blog post (A Short Rant on Repost Bloggers).

And if you think the owner of the site from which you pinched the content won’t find out, be careful. It doesn’t take a great deal to find out when someone’s doing that sort of thing. I personally have a few Google Alerts set up to let me know when I’m getting mentioned, someone cites my book, and other things. I know others do the same sort of thing.

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