Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2013, and its references to Penguin as Google’s latest algorithm change, PageRank as described and its traffic figures, including a roughly 50% fall in search visits, all refer to that month.
Today I was reading what José Cervera, a lecturer on the communication degree at UNIR (the International University of La Rioja), said at a digital journalism training course organised by the Argentine journalism forum Fopea. Among his main points, he stressed that media outlets that don’t link to their sources will not survive the internet, and that we all work for Google, because every link to an original source gives relevance to a specific page. That was the founding principle of Google’s search engine, with the famous PageRank (the more inbound links a page has, the higher its PageRank, and therefore the greater its relevance and the better its position in Google).
Google keeps working to improve so that original, quality content appears at the top, although its latest algorithm change, Penguin, doesn’t seem to have worked as well as it should: I have never seen so much junk at the top of search results. (By junk or rubbish I mean pages that appear ahead of the original even though they are an exact copy. I’ll get to the point.)
This blog has not started 2013 on a very good footing in terms of search rankings, just when we were breaking records in direct visits, number of followers and so on. Visits from search engines fell by around 50%, so at first glance it looked like a Google penalty. After “talking” to Google, they made it clear to me that it is not a penalty and that it could be due to the constant changes in the algorithm.
That led me to talk to an SEO expert who, while unable to pin down the exact causes of the drop in rankings, did find that part of it might be because Google had interpreted our content as unoriginal or copied. That had us searching by keywords and exact titles, and to our surprise we found that many of our articles had been pushed down the rankings, making way for the pages that had copied them.
The advice I was given is to report it to Google by filling in those complaint forms, which I don’t feel up to doing. First of all, because off the top of my head I have counted more than 75 pages that, regularly or occasionally, have freely helped themselves to our content without bothering to cite the source, copying even my own turns of phrase, and among them are some top-tier news outlets. I have absolutely nothing against anyone, as I understand that when freelance writers or journalists are hired, they take the easy route. On other websites I do see more “malpractice” or bad faith, but I thought Google would be able to detect all of that, so I didn’t give it the importance it seems I should have.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, if you search Google for the exact phrase “Warren Buffett’s 16 best investment tips“, you will find copies of our article, an article that took me four hours to write and that has been copied on 20 websites, none of which deigned to cite us as the source. And some of those that did cite a source cited the copy rather than the original. This means the copy gets the links, and so the algorithm decides that it is the relevant content on the web. I could give around 85 examples of articles that have been knocked out of the top search positions and overtaken by copies, but there’s no point.
Our licence is very clear. I don’t like copyright, so I chose a Creative Commons 2.5 licence, which makes it very clear that you can copy, change, sell, shred or make love to our articles, as long as you cite the source with a link to the article. It is something very simple that people seem to find hard to do, whereas I do it often in articles based on other sources, because it costs me nothing to write “according to Business Insider“, “according to The New York Times“, and so on.
The height of absurdity is seeing some sites put a copyright notice on their pages when their content comes from other websites and blogs.
Where I’m from we use the word trepa (a climber, someone who gets ahead on others’ backs), while in Colombia they call it a chupa ruedas (a “wheel-sucker”, someone who rides in your slipstream). I don’t mind people riding in my slipstream, but in this case, by doing so, some of them have caused my car to break down.
“Every time you copy and don’t cite, you are telling the person you copy that they are good enough to copy but not good enough to cite.” My question, and that of many others in the same situation as me, would be: how should we interpret that? And how will Google’s Penguin interpret certain articles that have more copies than “likes”?
Featured image: Jason Auch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
