Archive for 'Copywriting and Content'

Using RSS to create dynamic content for SEO

Posted on 25. May, 2007 by Carolyn Shelby.

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The Beginning SEO Podcast with Brian Mark and David Brown (that was just posted today) talks about using RSS and XML to incorporate news, headlines and blog headlines into your websites to keep the content fresh, the visitors returning and the bots indexing on a regular basis. The podcast is about 30ish minutes long, and I’m the special guest, which is why I’m blogging about it :)

Thanks to Brian and Dave for having me on again!

Popularity: 51% [?]

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Does RSS equal implicit permission to reprint?

Posted on 26. Mar, 2007 by Carolyn Shelby.

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There’s a fun debate happening right this very second on WebmasterRadio.fm chat where people are arguing over whether or not the existence of an RSS feed is the same as implicitly granting permission to anyone and everyone to republish your work.

Personally, I’m on the fence on the morality of the issue. It’s wrong and bad to scrape, but I don’t see how you can prevent scrapers from taking your content and running it. You may as well acknowledge that the practice occurs and use it to your advantage by seeding your feed with some back links to your site(s). You can also limit your feed to just snippets of the full articles or even just headlines to make your content less desirable to scrapers.

To try to DMCA every site you catch reprinting your work is an exercise in futility, and you’d have a really tough time suing anyone over it unless:

  1. Your content is being reprinted/republished by a legitimate/large, money making website, they are claiming they wrote it, and you can prove monetary damages.
  2. You’re a bored attorney and have lots of time to kill.
  3. You have a relative who is a bored attorney and has lots of time to kill.
  4. You’ve got deep enough pockets and a deep enough hatred for a single, particular violator and want to go to war on principle, and you don’t care that you won’t actually win any money (because you can’t squeeze blood from a rock).

Really, unless situation #1 is applicable, it’s pointless to pursue.

Ultimately, I think your best bet is to put all the appropriate copyright claims and notices and restrictions on your site and in your TOS, and then take the proactive measure of sprinkling some back links into your content. Also, not providing the full articles in the feeds, but limiting the feed to just snippets or headlines might help, too.

Popularity: 50% [?]

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I rank #1 on Google for Lafayette IN Prostitution (Yay?)

Posted on 13. Mar, 2007 by Carolyn Shelby.

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My other site runs community news, so I receive press releases from businesses, city hall, civic groups, etc. on a regular basis. Last Friday, I received a news release from the county sheriff’s department about three women who were arrested at a local hotel for prostitution. This was pretty scandalous AND there were mugshots, so of course, I was happy to post it.

So, now I’m ranking #1 for Lafayette IN Prostitution and my friends are teasing me mercilessly. There is a nice little bump in traffic and it’s been fun to see who’s searching for what and ending up on that article.

The other interesting thing I’ve been keeping an eye on is what ads are showing in my AdSense now. The last time I ran a story about a topic that contained a lot of highly suspect keywords AdSense freaked out. (Short version: 60 year old pedophile was soliciting what he thought were 15 year old girls in a chatroom for sex — turned out to be cops.) Anyway, all of the ads on my site switched to PSAs for like two weeks (and as you probably know, you don’t get paid for Public Service Announcements) and it sucked. Since then, I’ve diversified my income streams quite a bit so I don’t actually care if AdSense disappears on me for a couple weeks; however, it is interesting to watch just in terms of how the story is treated.

It doesn’t look like the ads have kicked over to just PSAs yet, but my AdSense revenue over the weekend fell through the floor. If anything changes I’ll be sure to post an update.

Popularity: 24% [?]

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