How To Ensure You Never Get Link Love
Wonderful!
I was going to post on things to keep in mind while performing social media marketing. I was going to copy and paste a few comments from another blog that had addressed that very topic. Then I was going to link to it (you know, it’s always nice to give attribution!). Well, something came up and instead and I’m going to tell you the one thing you should NEVER do.
I went to copy and paste and I couldn’t. The blog owner had inserted some security code that prevents people from copying his content. How stupid is that? Well, he won’t get a link from me.
The funny thing is he has the AddThis bar at the end of his post AND is giving great advice on how to conduct social media marketing. I thought he knew what he was doing. Until I tried to help him spread his message.
No. 1 Thing NOT To Do On Your Website Or Blog:
(Drum roll please)
Don’t be so caught up on protecting your content that you won’t let people use it for themselves. In essence, I’m telling you to let people STEAL your content. In fact, reward them for doing so. It’s the law of the universe.
When you write content that people like they will use it, and they will link back to you as the original source. You get a link back (a valuable one-way link) and credit for coming up with the idea. Are there people who will snag your stuff and not credit you with attribution? Yes, but those are fewer in number and you have recourse with those people. Go to Copyscape and run your content through their filters. If you find a non-attributing content lifter send them a cease and desist letter. If they don’t respond positively then report them to their ISP. Honestly, you have a lot more to lose by discouraging back links than you do by letting people steal your content.
So who is this mystery blogger that doesn’t want my linkage? Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh (nervous laugh) … I’ll never tell.
7 Responses to “How To Ensure You Never Get Link Love”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
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Brick Marketing - SEO Company
[...] Stamoulis write an exasperated post titled How To Ensure You Never Get Link Love after trying to give someone link love who made the process nearly [...]
We liked this post so much that we put it in our Friday “Who Said That?” Keep up the good work.
Nick, thank-you for the warning! I just checked my own blog (http://www.mcmvoices.com/blog/blog.htm) to make sure I wasn’t committing that blunder myself, since I’m not sure I would know what to do about it if I were (I’m not). For some reason, your post above doesn’t seem to be copyable.
Hi Mary, Thanks for your message. Not sure why this is not working for you. How are you trying to copy the post?
Dragging and clicking, as well as ctrl-A and copying (I’m a PC-user). I don’t have an actual need to copy, I was just curious about it.
On a related topic, it drives me nuts when I’m trying to paste somebody’s contact information from their website into my database and it’s graphic based so I have to go back and forth between screens and type it in by hand. And it’s incredibly common too.
Thanks for the post Nick!
This came up with something I was doing at one time. I bought software called autobloggerpro and installed it. It’s works with wordpress.
I can enter any url into the software and it will add the rss feed found there to the database.
When you hit a button that says “run autobloggerpro” it pulls all the posts from the feeds I have added and posts them to my wordpress blog, plus creates a link back to the blog where the post came from. Even the title of the post links back to the blog it came from. If someone clicks to comment, they are taken to where they can comment on the original blog.
So everything points back to the source. In addition to that, I only pulled feeds where the other blog only allowed a summary so a user would have to click over to the other blog to finish reading the post.
I tried to build a blog with it that users would like. Kind of like all my favorite blogs in one place.
I was accused of stealing content and had bloggers telling me to remove their content.
Had I copied a part of their post and put it in blockquotes, then commented on it, would they have said the same thing? Bloggers do that top the NYTimes, SEONews, and other sources all the time. Common practice and ok as long as you link back to the source.
But because it was automated they felt it was stealing. What it was doing was promoting their blogs, giving them valuable links, and helping them but they weren’t smart enough to realize it.
I now use the software only to pull feeds from blogs we own or blogs my clients own. It has helped tremendously. The blog I use it on is a PR5 so the backlinks for my client’s blogs are valuable.
It gets crawled better and more often than many blogs. I have google alerts set up for the client blogs and find often that a seartch engine has picked up the post on a client’s blog due to it being on my autobloggerpro blog.
There are people who misused the software just as there are those who steal content, but thats no reason to believe everyone does.
Just my 2 1/2 cents worth.
Great points Chris!
Hi Mary,
I agree with you about posting conact information in the form of an image. Many people tend to do this for SEO reasons:
- Not have a spider read contact information that might be repetitive on each page.
- Prevent an increase of spam (if the email address is an image).
Hope this helps and thanks for your comments!
Take Care,
Nick