Does Google Support Content Theft?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, April 8, 2009 Comments (4)

Everyone seems to hate Google these days. But for different reasons. Aaron Wall says they are in cahoots with the content thieves.

Simply put, Google has partnered with virtually every online content thief (as needed) to force premium content providers to make their stuff available. Either you get credit for your work, or someone else does.

Is it a valid criticism?

We all know Google isn’t perfect. That’s no question. But is it evil? I think it depends on how you define evil. Content theft is a serious issue, but is Google the problem?

Before we make Google the problem let’s consider that much of the search engine does is based on its algorithm. (This is what determines the positioning of a web page…good to know for your long term search engine optimization efforts:o)

An algorithm is a robot, a machine (or represents the machine). And machines are by nature amoral, not immoral. Amoral. That puts them in neutral territory. But that doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility for condoning content theft – if indeed they do.

The issue involves your robots.txt. If you tell Google not to crawl your content and someone else has scraped it, that isn’t Google’s fault. Google can’t tell that your content is original if it appears on another website while your robots.txt told Google not to crawl your content on your own site. Remember, it’s a machine. It doesn’t think. It just does what it’s told. But Google should still seek a solution for dealing with the content thieves. Perhaps somewhere outside its algorithm!

Comments (4) Category: Content Development

Read similar posts in Content Development

4 Comments

Comment by aaron wall

Made Thursday, 9 of April , 2009 at 3:46 am

And Google suggests people download torrents of your paid product. They *chose* not to fix that error just like they *chose* to let the government grand reverse billing fraud ads to run.

They often use hand editorial to “fight spam” but they seem not to care when they promote wholesale theft of copyright. And they try to ensure that protecting your copyright is an expensive and time consuming process.

The algorithm is a myth used to give them strategic leeway with their editorial policies.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 9 of April , 2009 at 5:09 am

@ aaron wall – Thanks for your comment. This is a very good conspiracy theory about the Google search algorithm ) I have also heard about the hand editorial but have never seen any actual proof, so that’s why I am not sure about it…

Comment by Michael

Made Wednesday, 20 of May , 2009 at 9:36 am

If I use an article from another website on my site that does come from an rss feed but give the author credit with their links am I stealing content? Are you supposed to contact the author and request their permission to post their article on your site?
Thanks,
Michal (novice)

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Wednesday, 20 of May , 2009 at 12:08 pm

@Michael – Thanks for your question…

I actually just wrote blog post about this entire topic:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/05/20/permission-scraping-content/

Hope this answers your question and helps!