Remember that time when cheating was cool? Oh, wait. It never was.
We recently stumbled across a competitor whose website is using our original content. And not just a few words here and there. We’re talking entire blocks of text and bulleted lists.
Our content (and other non-original content–that’s all I’m saying about that) is placed throughout her website. But my favourite part is how she posted some social media statistics and accredited them to USA Today. Why give credit for one copy-and-paste job, but not the others?
This is annoying for a few reasons:
- Cheating is cheating, whether you’re a child or an adult. People cheat because they’re lazy and don’t know what they’re talking about. I once cheated on a lab report because I didn’t care about chemistry and wanted to go play outside, but why did this company cheat? You’d think that someone who wants to build a reputable social media marketing company would have enough initiative and creativity to write their own website content. After all, customers expect them to update blogs, tweets and Facebook posts, write profile information and–cough cough– create content. Call me picky, but I wouldn’t trust a company whose website is built on a ctrl-c, ctrl-v foundation.
- A social media marketing company who steals site content is destroying the very thing they’re trying to accomplish. Google likes having unique search results, so it filters out duplicate websites. This means that the site with the original content is more likely to show up. It’s scary when a company offers search optimization services even though they don’t understand the basic principles of it. Not to mention that fact that they’re making their own website difficult to find.
- It’s plagiarism and it’s annoying.
I know that a lot of social media marketing companies offer similar types of services, but if everyone else can find an original way to sell themselves, why can’t they? Basing your business model on stolen duplicate content not only makes your business look bad, but it’s also just wrong.
