How To Blog For Newbies Day 15

I think many of you can relate to this. You are sitting on your favourite arm chair, your finger frolicking on the keypads of your laptop. You surf to JohnChow.com, Problogger.net, then to DoshDosh.com, fidgeting away not knowing what to churn out for your next content.

Then, an evil thought cross your mind. You search JohnChow.com, you come across a topic. In your haste to meet the ‘deadline’ of your posting schedule, you left-click, pull and highlight the whole article, copy….the rest is history. You feel exhilarated. Hopefully, nobody know about this….HUH!

Think again when you plan to do this. Duplicating content is considered unethical, if not an offence in the blog world. Apart from out-of-idea bloggers, spammers who are usually desperate for fresh contents, are the main ‘criminals’ in content plagiarism. They begin by scraping through legitimate contents from hard working bloggers’ work, unscrambling the paragraphs and then reassemble the bits and parts and voila! The fact is, you have to seriously learn how to blog honestly.

Basically, contents can be categorized into 4 types:

1. Unique Contents

These are the pedigrees of content. They comes from your heart, your inspiration and your experience. Look at howtoblog.org. All the post comes from my own experience (amidst 1 month) in my blogging journey. The fear, the hope, the vision.

When a blog comes completely from your own, you are emotionally attached to it. Well, I am guilty one way or another of content duplication in my other blogs which are mostly technological reviews of electronic gadgets and appliances. But be reminded, those are considered niche product websites and the reason I created them is purely for commercial purpose.

2. Websites With Identical Contents

These are pure duplicates. Webmasters who mass produce websites purely out greed, or I should say, ignorance . I bet there is no emotional feelings involved. Something like a one night stand, if you understand what I mean.

This scenario usually applies to affiliate site which contain identical content. Another type of website with doorways, whereby the site will bring you to another landing page of another site, with similar content.

3. Scraped Content

Scrapped content is when you take some contents from other website, repackaged and take it as a new content later.

This is a dilemma to me. As a newbie, sometimes I search through other more established blogs to look for ideas. Understand this, although most of my experience are real life experience, i may not know enough. As a result, I hate to see what I post in my blog went on to mislead my fellow bloggers into making irreparable mistakes. I still remember making a mistake on the meta tags in my MultiZoneAmplifier.com, and guess what, the whole site just dissapeared!

For example, my post on SEO is mostly via my learning experience from my mentor. However, when it comes to the meta tags and HTML code, come on man, I am a Business Manager, not a programmer.

4. Distributing Article to Other Articles Site

Let’s say you came out with a new post, you published it in ezine. Later it gets copied and you find it all over other websites. Well, ask yourself this. Is this good?

Imagine an artist or a software writer whose work got duplicated and sold in the pirated market. If you look at the bright side, mostly the popular gets copied. If you are an artist, this kind of duplication could be translated into lost revenue. Fortunately, its less serious in blogs. Googlebots have their own way in distinguishing the original writer from the duplicator, thus its less likely to hurt your page ranking.

In this case, Googlebots would usually rely on the link popularity and your blog reputation to determine if you are the original content writer.

Thus as a newbie, continue to build on your blog and like I always say, take a break if you don’t have any original ideas to milk. Search engines like Google rely on link popularity to determine the original source. Continue to add in original contents and always build your backlinks via submission of articles. This will gradually put you on a stronger foothold as an established blogger in the internet community.

From what I understand, Google usually penalize plagiarism through demotion in page ranking. If you are serious about your blog as a business, losing your page rank is serious. Your blogsite is an asset which is built through sheer hard work and love. She is an image of your personality and once this image is dented, it reflects on your reputation too. Think of Tiger Wood!

As with any other business, let me give you an advise. Building your blog is akin to building a business. Forget about what others are doing and just focus on building your blog business as ethically as possible. Manage her well and provide leadership to the direction of your blog.

Lastly, take a break when you have nothing to say!

Source: CartoonStock.com

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