Internal Links and Content Theft
July 6, 2008
The usual reason to build internal links into blog posts is so the reader can dig deeper into your blog to find related information. I recently did this elsewhere with “What Ingredients Must an Essay Contain?.” A guest post I did for BlogCatalog, “Do You Link to Your Sources?,” follows a similar principle with one such link, but that link leads back to my own blog. The guest post also ends with a short sketch of who I am and includes links to my blogs. These links might have netted me some new visitors, and they certainly provided new relevant backlinks, which can help increase my rankings in Google’s search results.
Something I was not expecting (because bad things only happen to other people, right?), but which Dane Morgan had pointed out on the BlogCatalog forums, is that these links can benefit you if someone decides to steal your content. They give you backlinks and lead readers back to the original author of the content. I just earned backlinks this way for my guest post, so maybe I shouldn’t let the theft bother me too much. The only downside is that my name is on this blog, as if I had chosen to write for the thing. Too bad. (No, I am not going to link to the thieves here and reward them.) I have written to the people who are hosting it. Meanwhile, this theft is one more reason for readers on the internet to be circumspect about many websites. Just because one might have good content, does not mean the that the content belongs to that site. This is one factor I had not considered when offering advice to my students about how to determine the reliability of a website, though such sites seem to fall short in other ways anyway.
Why don’t thieves remove telltale internal links from their posts? I suspect that some don’t know that what they are doing is wrong. Isn’t stuff on the internet free for anyone to use in any manner they see fit? Of course not, but that is a subject for another time. I think the main reason for not removing links is because the thieves just subscribe to certain blogs via RSS feeds and then automate the delivery of that stolen content to their own sites, which are frequently nothing more than splogs. They are concerned with quantity, not quality, and they do not want the production of this content to take up any more time than absolutely necessary.
Image source: Wikipedia Commons
Entry Filed under: blogging. Tags: backlinks, blogging, content theft, internal links, plagiarism.
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1. robertstevenson | July 6, 2008 at 2:05 pm
You’re posts are so valuable it’s hard for thieves to resist. Maybe if you didn’t write so well, they wouldn’t be such a temptation. Either that or follow the advice of this excellent post. I stumbled it. Thanks.
2. Jamie | July 6, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Very informative post! I’ve yet to deal with content theft, but I may start adding links just in case. With the links in place, it would probably be easier to track down the thieves as well.
3. Shirley | July 6, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I think infringers are too lazy to remove links. They are too lazy to come up with their own idea or do the research. It is so easy to copy & paste. It is so easy to take credit for something that you didn’t do. Just for information sake 36 words is all the content you are able to take without it being infringement but a link must be provided.
4. Mark Stoneman | July 6, 2008 at 10:32 pm
@Robert, @Jamie: Thank you!
@Shirley: I don’t think you can reduce the amount of text you can quote to a specific number of words. It’s more about how significant a chunk you quote, and that could vary by the work you are quoting. If I’m quoting from a very short article, I would indeed only take a few words, but sometimes a little more is possible. I”m curious, though, where you got your number. It will certainly keep you out of trouble, unless you’re dealing with something very small.
5. Shirley | July 7, 2008 at 8:49 am
I did a little research on infringement. Just follow the link through my name and it will take you there I hope. I’ve never placed a direct link before. I do believe unless permission is given it’s only a certain number of words or characters.
6. Jonathan Bailey | July 10, 2008 at 12:49 am
The issue has a couple of sides. Yes, the backlinks can help mitigate against content theft, but only so far. First, many scrapers are stripping out all HTML to avoid diluting their outbound PR on internal links, Second, it doesn’t help much with human plagiarists, that are going to remove all links regardless.
It doesn’t work all of the time and seems to work less than half, there’s also a debate about the exact effectiveness of having the spam blog link to other articles on your site. I honestly have no answer to that. I know that a link back to the original article, something several WP plugins can do for you, WILL help, but other articles is debatable.
Certainly internal links are a good thing and should be done regardless of content theft issues, but I wouldn’t rely on them as a content theft prevention/mitigation strategy. Sadly, it just isn’t reliable enough.
On that note, if there is anything I can do to help with any of your content theft issues, let me know. I am here to help!
7. Mark Stoneman | July 10, 2008 at 7:44 am
@Jonathan: I appreciate that this is not a full-proof method. It’s not intended as a complete strategy for dealing with the problem. But it does at least give a person a little leverage, because really, the bulk of copying is done by automated splogs, which can’t very well strip out all HTML without making their copied content worthless.