At its core, my first impression of SocialRank niche websites was that it was little more than a WordPress splog scraping my content based upon keywords used and giving some kind of relevant or irrelevant ranking based upon some internal algorithm.

It is still my content appearing on a 3rd party site, in the same way as one of the millions of kubrik themed sites that just grab keyword based feeds from Technorati.

As I have said in the past, I license my content as GPL, so am quite happy for people to repurpose it, and hopefully if they provide a link a little traffic finds it’s way back to my site.

There is however one thing I absolutely detest

Don’t Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content

If you site contains no original content, if you are not entering the “blogging conversation”, I don’t want you to spam the hell out of me with trackbacks and pingbacks.
I sent an email to SocialRank to switch off the pinging, the pinging continued with my email box full of ping notifications. All I received in response to my email was an invite to their beta.

Would you join the beta of a company effectively hiting you with trackback/pingback spam?

I don’t see them anymore, I have told Spam Karma to blacklist them just like any of the other splogs.

On the other hand I read today an interview Ben did with SocialRank.

This seems similar to the Quechup debacle at the beginning of last month where an over enthusiastic viral referral system effectively destroyed the social network before it gained any traction. The first page of results in Google only mention negative things about Quechup – I assume they rebranded.

I never accepted an invite to Quechup, but I assume within the terms and conditions somewhere they gave some notification that when you provide your friend’s details, they would automatically send email invites. Thus the emails probably weren’t spam, and looking back through the few emails I received, were not to my knowledge in any way illegal, with a clear opt-out option, company details, a nice link through to a company privacy policy etc. In fact iDate who own Quechup issued a press release 2 weeks ago explaining the changes made to the feature to stop people making mistakes when inviting people.

I think the problem comes with people so used to how Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented these in my opinion quite dangerous address book sharing features, they assume every site works the same way, even if the other site actually had a similar but different feature well before LinkedIn and Facebook. The iDate press release mentions having this feature since 2005.

With SocialRank it is different. They are the ones filling my email box with pingback after pingback proclaiming that they scraped my content.

I don’t regard them as a stinking splog, they are still linking back to the original source with a followable link, but currently they are more annoying than Quechup invites just 1 month ago.

Anyway one paragraph interested me

One of the most important parts of the QC and serping process is making sure the sites we link to on Mahalo do not have scraped or stolen content, that is, the sites do not take content from another source without attribution. We also don’t want to link to sites that borrow content from other sources with attribution if we can link to the original source instead.

I would like to applaud Mahalo for this concerted effort not to link to Wikipedia any more.

Wikipedia by their own charter does not contain any original material, and worse, they don’t give search engine readable links to their sources of information (thus potentially inflating their position in the search results compared to their sources)

Just copy the links and nothing else from the bottom of each Wikipedia article, make sure you remove the nofollow, and there will immediately be better content on Mahalo.

Of course it would be necessary to verify the links, but after that the link to Wikipedia can be dumped, as it is just the link URLs for which Wikipedia have no copyright claim.

Additional bonus – you would gain a little more credibility with your arch enemies (The snake oil SEO scumbags) by actually doing something they might agree with.

All words in this article in italics should be taken with a little bit of sarcasm

• Are people constantly ripping off your content?
• Do you feel powerless to defend your copyright?
• Is the battle against plagiarism taking up more and more of your time?

Maybe you are going about things the wrong way and should take some inspiration from Judo…

What is Judo?

Literally “the gentle way,” this ancient martial art (it’s origin is from jujutsu) makes use of the opponent’s strength to overcome him, thereby making it possible for a David to throw a Goliath. Kano Jigoro (the founder of the Kodokan style of judo) developed the art into what is now an international Olympic sport.
Cheddar Judo Club

The conventional approach you will see recommended on multiple blogs is you send the site owner email, issue a DMCA or report the site to Google Adsense if they are monetizing your content.

Unfortunately that is fighting an uphill battle that you have little hope of winning as the hydra can always grow new heads and many sites using your content don’t attempt to monetise it directly.

Active Syndication

Similar in concept to article marketing, I actively encourage the syndication of my blog content by licensing it as GPL.

If you understand how article syndication works you could look on rss syndication with permission or without as a form of article marketing.

You can benefit from the duplicate content that is scattered over the web as seeds of knowledge.

How To Benefit From Legitimate Syndication & Splogs

• Include lots of internal links within each of your blog articles – these can be manually inserted, or in the form of related links and tags at the end of each article.
• Ensure there is a link to the permalink of your article within the article content
• If someone asks for permission to syndicate your content, request politely that they include a link to each original article, and not to your domain in the credits.

How To Include A Permalink In A Feed?

I do it currently with a hacked version of my Disclosure Policy Plugin but probably a simpler solution for most people would be to use one of the following.

• Better Feed – this includes both %%posttitle%% and %%posturl%% options so you can add a SEO friendly permalink to your RSS feeds.
• Sig2Feed – Can be used to add a link back to your site, but that could be easily modified to include a permalink.
• ©Feed – provides support for adding a permalink to your feed
• Various Other Feed Copyright Plugins – Almost all feed copyright and advertising plugins can easily be modified to include a permalink to your original article

Rather than fight plagiarism, learn to use it to your advantage.

Quite often the sites using your content without explicit permission are gaining search engine traffic, but it is also likely that that is search traffic you wouldn’t have received anyway.
By providing links through to the source of knowledge, a percentage of that traffic you wouldn’t have received will be led back to your blog.

In the time you spend fighting plagiarism, and more often than not reading about it, and worrying about it, you could quite easily have written more content on your blog which will please your readers, encourage more legitimate links to your site, and ultimately gain you more additional links from all forms of syndication, whether they have explicit permission or not.

Picture Credits

Note: I don’t know of the best solution to include post permalinks within the content of RSS feeds on platforms other than WordPress.

It is strange that the new service I am going to talk about today, iPlagiarismCheck is actually being marketed to a totally different audience, students and teachers, than the one I focus on, internet and niche marketing, but there is a high chance I have a lot of readers who are going to jump on this service as soon as they hear about it.

Yes students have a lot to worry about, they might fail their courses if they are caught for plagiarism but I think this software is going to excel for internet marketers and niche marketers who are outsourcing content creation.

How Relevant Is iPlagiarismCheck To My Readers?

I suppose the proof is in the eating – I just bought a 1 year subscription

2Checkout.com Order Number 9999999999 (this was a 10 figure order number)

Contents of your purchase:
Product ID : 4
Vendor Product ID : SUPER-SAVER (All documents processed on URGENT priority)
Product Description: Unlimited Document Submissions for 1-YEAR (US$ 65.00)
Product Name : SUPER-SAVER EDITION Package
Quantity : 1

Total : 33.66 ( GBP )

Billing Information
Andrew L Beard
IP: 83.23.254.103 IP Location: Warsaw ( Poland )
myemailaddress@gmail.com
+48-62-7382438
Keedz Ltd
56 Rookesley Road
Orpington BR54HJ
United Kingdom ( GBR )

Distributed By:
Plagiarism-Checkers, Inc. ( www.iplagiarismcheck.com )

Affiliate Program

I should point out this review was ordered using the facilities in my sidebar, but in my opinion was an extremely smart move, because whilst they might pay $143 for the review, of which I get $130, I dearly wish they had an affiliate program.

They have already gained half of that back from my own purchase of a full year subscription, and if this review doesn’t send them a few more, I will eat my keyboard.

Outsourcers Have The Most To Lose With Copyright Infringement

If you are paying someone to write content for you for an ebook you are marketing commercially, and they decide to “borrow” some content from elsewhere, you could face rather a large bill, especially if something was copied from material where the copyright was registered in the US.

iPlagiarismCheck state on their site

If a plagiarist receives more than $2,500 for copyrighted material, he or she may face up to $250,000 in fines and up to ten years in jail!

Imagine you had hired someone to write an ebook for you from one of the many out-sourcing services and hadn’t taken the time to check their work.

iPlagiarismCheck Isn’t The Same As Copyscape

Copyscape has all kinds of fancy features such as an API that can be used to process documents, and probably at this time has a more refined, but at the same time totally different online interface.

To test out iPlagiarismCheck I sent them a 60 page ebook I knew contained some sections that were almost identical to some content you can find on the web.

The report I received back was a single long page with direct hyperlinks from within the text to the site the content was potentially copied from.

Some information is lost in this situation currently because if the content appears on multiple sites, only one instance appears.

I should also note that with the current interface every phrase isn’t highlighted within plagiarised text. That is a little confusing for those used to Copyscape “highlighting” of every word. The interface is designed currently for teachers and students, thus they wouldn’t necessarily need to know each individual word that needed detection.
The system noted that around 3% of the document I submitted were thought to be plagiarised, and that corresponded with the 2 pages of the 60 page PDF, even though not every word was linked.

What is important however is if you are dealing with content that has been copied from multiple sources, some of it legitimately, such as public domain, then this gives you an advantage.

Imagine the results you would obtain from Copyscape if you uploaded a 400 page ebook that was supposedly meant to be either original work, or sourced from public domain material.

I can imagine the results would be fairly noisy, and it would be difficult to spot where each text fragment actually came from.

Hopefully they are going to be able to offer listing multiple sources for each fragment, so you can determine the original source such as a .gov site, or Wikipedia. (I have been assured that they are detecting far more than is currently displayed)
I can already imagine some fancy AJAX/CSS solution to pull in a list of all occurrences of a text fragment.

Cost

On surface value, for limited use, some people might think that Copyscape is better value, but you have to take into account how Copyscape works, and how much time you might spend sifting through results for a huge document.

iPlagiarismCheck isn’t providing core Copyscape features such as protecting your website content, they are focusing on ensuring the content you create, submit to examining boards, or just publish on your website, or for sale in various forms isn’t going to get you in trouble.

The minimim purchase for Copyscape Professional is $5 (100 credits) but a single search might use multiple credits (I believe it is 1 credit per 2000 words)

I think $65 for unlimited use for a year is a bargain for anyone actively creating content using outsourcers. You might be able to risk using cheaper writers.

If you are creating content for others, you would probably be allowed to provide a link to the plagiarism report you submitted yourself as proof that you are creating quality work.

Working With I Plagiarism Check

It is a new site, it seems they have concentrated more on their back end systems (detection) than the front end, which for some people might make it more or less convenient.

There is no instant result processing currently, and maybe never will be. They have a form to submit documents to be processed after you have registered with them, but for some customers the ideal method of communication is email.

You send them an email with your 2Checkout receipt number in the title, and attach the document you want processed. The document is then added to their processing queue, and after a period of time depending on your subscription level, you are sent a notification back.
It only takes a few minutes to receive a result even if it is a 60 page document.

If you are someone who automates some of your tasks with email templates, this is just so easy to use. Just attach a document with all the content you need checked, and send it to them.

A little later they send you an email with a link to a report which you can have on file, filter to process when you have time, or even forward directly to someone else to check out.

I should point out that the interface as depicted on their demonstration page isn’t currently available, and is certainly subject to change.
I would look on this site as still being in beta, even though the back end technology works well.

iPlagiarismCheck Future Developments

I have been told by Susan Keisler who is their support rep, and who currently answers emails in great detail directly that there will soon be a much improved interface for “members”, and all kinds of interfaces and ways to upload content.
iPlagiarism are quite new to the marketplace, unlike Copyscape, and Susan informed me that their primary target audiences are students, teachers and researchers as a “people-oriented service”.

I would like to strongly suggest that “Information Marketers” of all kinds should jump on this service as quickly as possible, and help them shape it into a useful tool to help defend your business interests.

Blackhats Beware

Some of the patented technology in this system is, at least on paper fairly impressive, but will take a while to test to see how effective it is.

The things of note include:-

• Detecting plagiarism in 20 other languages – I actually asked for clarification on this, the system can detect if someone has taken work written in English, and translated it into French, or vice versa
• Synonyms – replacing words, and even changing word order can be detected

Private Label Rights

This isn’t very suitable for checking whether private label rights articles or manuscripts are “safe” to use, unless you are a site owner and have commissioned original work.
Not long after content is made available, in theory it would be on 100s of websites which would pollute results.

It might be suitable for checking whether articles you have rewritten, adding your own content and “voice” are appropriate for use on your own sites, but I would never advocate then syndicating such articles to article directories.

This is a good example of how technology improvements have a way of catching up with indiscretions, and even though you might have been able to slip things through in the past, eventually the “plagiarism CSI” will get you.

Conclusions

I am going to include the exact link text that was requested in the review request interface. I normally gain written confirmation that I don’t have to include specific linking, but in this case in some ways it is appropriate because they are looking for buzz, and to be honest this is a “buzz” kind of link, and offers very little SEO benefit so I stuck a nofollow on it.
Then I did a little keyword research and the result is the “SEO useful” second link – that one is an editorial bonus, I am happy with my purchase.

Fun Powertip: take an ebook you have purchased or downloaded and see how much of the content was original, or where it was sourced from.

WordPress SEO Tips & Hacks

Subscribe to Comments Hacks – I am including this at the top of the list because it is highly important. Emails sent out from your domain could cause you problems with email delivery or spam complaints, and the plugin by default doesn’t comply with CAN-SPAM if you or someone else (a spammer) includes a marketing message in your emails.
The danger of overloading your server with emails being sent faster than your host allows is also worth thinking about. I know multiple blogs that have problems delivering all subscribed comments and I am sure the owners are not aware of this.

Just imagine you have 20 people comment on a post, and then you get 5 new comments in the space of one hour – that would put you over the limit on most shared hosting.

Mine are set up to be delivered by Gmail by SMTP – which email host is going to block Gmail totally?

Spam Karma latest release, and I also speculated that I get less spam using it than if I was using Akismet.

My Ultimate List of Dofollow Plugins first published in February still gains links on a daily basis, and has helped convert 100s of people into removing nofollow from their comments and trackbacks.
I have a followup project planned that I will launch within the next week that will provide a way of highlighting blogs that wish to be highlighted as supporting DoFollow.
The page also now includes information on how to remove NoFollow from blogs using Blogger and I hope to be able to include detailed Typepad and MoveableType instructions (I know of 3 people working on this)

How linking to social media and bookmarking sites could affect your search engine performance. The discussion that followed on is just as informative as the post.

Tagging and How Tagging Can Help SEO is one of the primary topics of this blog. I have written a lot of posts regarding the benefits of using Ultimate Tag Warrior (that is a link to the tag).
My analysis of the Google BlogSearch Patent didn’t gain a lot of links from SEO blogs, but then most SEO bloggers don’t understand the benefits of tagging and are too worried about duplicate content (another tag link)

Do you get linked to by the press? I also highlighted how bad some press agencies are with linking.

My attack on Top Commenters plugins caused some uproar. It is great to provide a way to thank the people who comment on your blog, but I prefer to do that by using DoFollow.
If you can understand my milk bottle analogy, you will go a long way to improving the SEO profile of your blog. If you do use a Top Commenters plugin, at least include it using some WordPress logic functions such as is_home() and is_single()

Top WordPress Plugins

I will be opening up the voting for the first round of my cash donations for best wordpress plugins later today (I need to decide which plugin or service to use). I am giving away real money in large chunks to help support WordPress Plugin Development.

Monetization & Blogging Tips

Warning about using Amazon Contextual Links

PayPerPost vs Jason Calacanis turned into an in depth discussion regarding ThisNext vs PayPerPost on Disclosure (you really have to read the comments)

Performancing Metrics Is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing for Niche Website owners and why I recommend Clicky instead.

I write a lot about disclosure in affiliate marketing and blogging. Whilst PayPerPost is constantly being highlighted, the people doing the highlighting are actually as guilty of poor disclosure and unethical practices themselves.

Maki asked a number of bloggers why they display a feed counter and I gave what I believe is the most in depth answer. There are some good tips there for those people who already have an existing mailing list to jumpstart their blog subscription for an insane amount of social proof.
Why don’t Aweber and Getresponse offer a decent email subscription to RSS feeds that reports numbers to Feedburner? Anyone who uses their services misses out on the social proof benefit.
They should also offer their own social proof icons for email subscriptions.

In some ways I hate product launch formula style marketing of services. The scarcity factor makes it hard for a potential buyer to make an informed decision despite all the proof.
Sometimes the materials left over are of huge value, and I recommend you watch the videos from Rich Schefren.

Product Reviews

Stampede Traffic

Sponsored Reviews – with this service you can negotiate with me for paid reviews :)

Volusion Shopping Cart – was I too harsh on them?
Auction Ads

Web 2.0

Is this the Future of MyBlogLog when we finally get an API? Smart internet marketers should already be planning on how the data could be best integrated into other applications.

Tips on using Reddit and Stumbleupon. The StumbleUpon post lists my membership details to a number of social networks… lets be friends. I really should include those in my sidebar.

Sometimes it is amazing the knock-on effect of what you blog about.

My How To Use MyBlogLog post sent Cord some traffic, but the important factor is the quality of traffic sent. Eric from MyBlogLog saw the post, read Cord’s 2 part guide, and then listed it on the MyBlogLog blog, along with some more tips.

I wrote a fair amount about Twitter, partially because it was the talk of the blogosphere, and partially because as with all emerging technology, there were a lot of ethical problems in using it for commercial use. The best way to read full coverage is to use my Twitter tag.

I love Technorati, but they really have problems coping with all the new kinds of RSS and micro blog services such as Twitter, and co.Comment

I had some Digg success earlier in the month, with a story I submitted to Digg actually reaching the front page. The discussion is well worth reading with some insight from Michel Fortin and others.