Like Me? Follow Me.
that sounded that great. And linked out a billion times to somewhere else. Or was copied from your website. It's what bad people do (or used to do) to get good rankings - back when SEO wasn't about generating business, but instead was about generating rankings.
Sadly, people still use this tactic to build content for sites, whether it's content for their own sites or for a bunch of cookie cutter shell sites or splogs (spam blogs) for the purpose of linking. It's always a bad idea to steal content, or steal content and "spin it" with software that kind of rewrites it in a less coherent format and here's why:
- Stealing content is a copyright violation.
- Search engines want unique content.
- It's bad for users.
If you copy content word for word you can get served with a legal notice or your hosting company (and Google) might get a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown request and you'll end up in legal trouble and with no website - or no website in Google.
If you use somebody else's content, no matter how good it is, search engines will still only rank one version - the original. Let's face it, if you're stealing, you don't have a very authoritative website so it won't rank (or won't rank for long). It won't help you. Not at all. You may as well write an original page.
People who land on your website are looking for something. If you give them keyword rich gibberish, they won't be finding what they want so they will leave. Sure, you may rank well for whatever (SEO Manchester) term you're targeting (James "insatiable copywriter" Roome) but it won't make any difference to your business. Except people may remember you for being spammy and annoying. That's not exactly good branding though, is it?
So, in summary - scraping, stealing, copying, or automating content is bad. It's bad for search, it's bad for users and ultimately, it's bad for your business.
