The problem largely centers around the issue of what is known as duplicate content, or content that can be found at more than one place online. This is a problem because search engines typically like to display a variety of results for every query and routinely hide or drop down pages that are too similar to each other.

That being said, SEO is also often about linking, something that those who use Creative Commons works are usually obliged to do (when appropriate for the medium). This means that, while licensing your content via Creative Commons may raise a spectre of duplicate content, it also opens the doors to increased search engine trust.

So how does Creative Commons impact SEO? There’s no simple answer but there is definitely a lot of theory to pour over.

The SEO of Licensing Your Work

When you license your work under a Creative Commons License, or any open license for that matter, you’re putting it out there with the intention that others will use it. That, in turn, means multiple copies of your work floating around on the Web, each competing for the same attention from the search engines.

That is what brings about the aforementioned duplicate content issue. Google doesn’t want to give the same article (or a very similar one) two slots on the same results page so one has to either be pushed into the supplemental index or to a much lower ranking.

Usually, Google attempts to make a determination about which article is the original and which is the duplicate. However, as they recently admitted, they aren’t perfect at doing that as they sometimes index sites out of order. So, even though Google claims claim that the duplicate content “penalty” doesn’t exist, there’s still a real risk of being hurt in the rankings due to multiple copies of a work floating around.

However, Creative Commons uses of a work are typically supposed to come with a link back to the source as well as an acknowledgement of the license the content was used under. This is part of why Creative Commons can be such a powerful force to stop scraping.

These signs are pretty clear indications to the search engines as to which site is the original and that is why the SEO risk of legitimate Creative Commons use is much less than with scraping and/or plagiarism.

Also, since Creative Commons reuse is most often done by humans and not automated scrapers, the original has much more time online before the duplicates appear, increasing the likelihood it has been indexed and discovered as the original, further reducing the dangers.

For images, this risk is significantly less. The reason is that Google doesn’t do quite as good of a job spotting duplicate content in image search results and doesn’t put as much emphasis on originality. A simple image search will often turn up many different versions of the same image, often just different sizes.

That being said, Google is getting somewhat better at this and that may become an increasing fear as time goes on.

However, on the positive side, both images and text uses of CC-Licensed works can be used to generate inbound links and many SEO experts view Creative Commons as a great way to generate such links to your sites and profiles.

This assumes, of course, that everyone using CC-Licensed work is playing by the rules but, those that aren’t are committing copyright infringement the same as if the work wasn’t Creative Commons at all.

In the end, the risks are likely minimal but the value of the reward will depend on how much you can gain from the inbound links, something that will vary wildly from site to site.

The SEO of Using Creative Commons Content

On the flip side of the coin, you know instantly when you use a Creative Commons article or blog post that you’re getting something that’s been posted elsewhere and probably for some length of time.

As such, there’s probably little expectation that the article will be of much SEO value as Google will spot it as a duplicate and treat it as such. This is especially true since the Farmer/Panda updates that came down hard on content farms and other sites seen has having “low quality” and duplicate content.

That being said, images may provide some SEO benefit as they can often be picked up despite being duplicates. This is especially true if they are resized prior to being reposted.

However, if you use Creative Commons content on your site, SEO benefit probably should not be your primary motivation. Typically, it’s more about filling blank spots in your posting schedule and getting useful content out to your existing readers, rather than trying to obtain some SEO benefit.

For the purpose of SEO, original and compelling content is almost always best.

This isn’t to say you can’t rank well with duplicate content, but the odds are slim and the next shift in the winds at Google could blow away your efforts.

Instead, if you want SEO benefit from Creative Commons content, your best bet is, most likely, to find content you can create derivative works from and use the content as a building block to make something new.

That, in turn, will be much more compelling to the search engines than a mere copy/paste.

Bottom Line

In the end, the SEO risks of licensing your content via Creative Commons are fairly low. Though duplicate content is real concern, legitimate CC-licensed use is far less likely to harm your site than scraping, plagiarism and other forms of non-attributed use.

That being said, Google isn’t perfect and mistakes will happen, but most likely there’s not much harm that can come from licensing your content this way, at least from an SEO-only standpoint, and given the potential for inbound links there is at least the potential for some gain.

Still, the choice of using a Creative Commons License is a personal one and, even if the SEO risks are low it still isn’t right for everyone.

Basically, this is just one factor of many to weigh and, even then, for some the risks may not outweigh the rewards, especially for those who already have a ton of inbound links and have little use for a few more.

The story, which originally broke on Search Engine Land, has since gartered public responses from both Google and Microsoft, the owners of Bing.

The results have been a pretty ugly back and forth between the two companies, one that has ended with both sides accusing the others of being unethical and/or dishonest and a lot of negative press hurled at Microsoft.

So what is really going on? It’s not a simple question to answer, partly because we only have a brief glimpse of what either side is doing or has done behind the scenes. The most we can try to do is make heads or tails of it and see what it means both legally and ethically for the two companies.

What Happened: Does Bing Copy Google?

According to Google, after some recent relevancy updates to Bing, they began to notice a startling similarity between their results and Bing’s, especially on extremely unusual keyword results such “torsoraphy”, which is a misspelling for “tarsorrhaphy”, a rare surgery on the eyelids. According to Google, Bing wouldn’t correct the spelling, but would know to direct people to the same first result as Google.

This, in turn, prompted Google to run a “sting” operation where they manipulated the results of one hundred random, nonsensical search terms, such as “hiybbprqag”, to add random pages to the top of the results. Google then sent 20 of its engineers home with new Windows 8 laptops and had them perform test queries on Google from home in Internet Explorer 8 with Suggested Sites, a feature in IE8 that tracks user browsing to recommend related websites, and the Bing Toolbar both enabled.

The result was that, in about eight of the searches, Bing’s results were changed to match Google’s, even though the pages chosen by Google didn’t make sense for the query.

This was enough to convince Google that something was afoot and the story started making the rounds.

Bing later responded saying that they don’t copy from Google directly but that they do use the anonymous click and surfing data from their users as one of over 1,000 points of data to determine results. They went on to say that Google’s experiment was a “click fraud” attack similar to what spammers do and was trying to manipulate Bing’s results on ultra-long tail keywords where it was most vulnerable.

This, in turn, has raised serious questions about Microsoft’s monitoring of user activity, which seemingly wasn’t widespread knowledge before this incident. Google has said that it doesn’t use data from Chrome or its Google Bar to build its search results, other than possibly tracking site loading times, but Microsoft pointed to Android’s privacy policy, that Microsoft claims signals Google may be doing as such with their mobile operating system.

But all of this brings us back to our original question: Is Bing plagiarizing from Google?

No Easy Answers

As I read through the various points/counterpoints while researching this article, there were three facts that seemed to be largely overlooked:

1. Google’s Honeypot Worked Less Than 10% of the Time: Google attempted the honeypot with some 100 keywords but only 7-9 actually worked. That means that, in over 90 cases, it didn’t work.
2. The Keywords Involved Were Extreme Long Tail: They keywords in the honeypot were ones that showed no results or no relevant results. They keywords that aroused suspicion were primarily typos of strange, rarely-used words. Major searches, it seems, are unaffected by this as there is a lot of variance.
3. Engineers Had to Take Active Action: The engineers in the test didn’t simply alter Google’s results and wait for Bing to scrape them, they loaded up laptops, enabled tracking, performed the searches and clicked the desired result.

Clearly, this isn’t a case of Bing scraping Google’s results (which is what Scroogle does by design and with attribution). Instead, it’s a case of Bing’s underlying technology giving weight to actions by Microsoft IE users who visit Google. In short, what most seem to agree happened is:

1. Users submit surfing data via IE and the Bing toolbar.
2. Those users choose not to use Bing, use Google instead so Bing tracks those clicks.
3. On search terms where Bing has nothing or very little, those clicks sometimes get a lot of weight.

So, this brings us to the question I’ve been loathing: Is this plagiarism or otherwise unethical or illegal?

Legally, it seems dubious that Google’s search results could be considered copyrightable. Considering recently wire frame models based off of cars were deemed to lack sufficient creativity for copyrightability, it seems likely results generated solely by an algorithm, with no human involvement, would too. However, I wasn’t able to find a ruling directly aimed at this issue so, if anyone has one please send it my way.

Furthermore, Bing isn’t actually copying directly from Google, but looking at user data and drawing its own conclusions so, in the eyes of the law, it’s unlikely that there would be much in the way of a claim Google could make. It seems, largely, to be a matter between Microsoft and the users of its products.

That being said, the ethics are a much more complicated question.

Bing, when it set about introducing clicktracking as a factor in its search results, had to know that many of those it tracked would use Google and, therefore, it seems logical they knew that they would be getting information about Google results and they did nothing to prevent that. However, I’m not completely sure they should have.

For one, you can learn from your competitor’s results and product without copying it. By tracking clicks, Bing might be able to see that some sites that rank well in Google aren’t worth ranking well in their engine. This seems to be mostly what Bing does though as it was only non-competitive search terms that appears to be copied.

That being said, Bing, as Google’s main competitor, should be trying to create its own unique search experience, not merely trying to recreate Google’s with slightly better results. Though it may only be one factor that Bing considers, considering Google’s results for your own makes it look like you’re trying to build on Google’s back.

So is it unethical? I would consider it a gray area. At least as far as the relationship between Google and Bing goes, I don’t feel completely right giving Bing’s actions the OK, but I can’t outright condemn them either. Bing is walking a thin line here and a lot of what would determine their side on it depends on information we don’t have, such as exactly what information is collected and how it is used in Bing’s algorithm.

Sadly though, there are bigger questions to look at and, with those, even fewer good answers.

Bigger Questions

As important as the ethical and legal considerations are, there are other questions to ask, including:

1. How Aware Are Microsoft’s Users of the Tracking and It’s Use? Many seem to be surprised by what Microsoft is doing. How well was this use of private info disclosed and how clear was it made?
2. How Easy is it to Game Bing? Considering that the false Google results were irrelevant to their searches, it seems like “click fraud” as Microsoft calls it might be an easy way to game Bing, especially for long tail terms.
3. How, Exactly, is This Info Used? Though Microsoft makes it clear that it is just one of a thousand factors, it appears that click monitoring really has a sharp impact on the results. Exactly how much weight is this info given?

There aren’t any easy answers to these questions right now but I suspect we’ll hear more about the first one as this story spreads.

Bottom Line

The ethics of what Bing is doing (at least in regards to Google) are debatable and even I don’t have any solid answers, largely because this concept is still very new and the ethics haven’t been hashed out fully. However, there are bigger, probably more important questions being raised about Bing thanks to this revelation.

Though I don’t believe Bing is plagiarizing Google, at least not in the traditional sense of the word, Google may have exposed even greater mistakes an misdeeds of Bing by releasing the results of this test. In short, they make Bing look lazy, sloppy and easy-to-game, something that for a search engine may be even worse than being a plagiarist.

Clearly, this is a PR disaster for Bing and Microsoft, but I think the worst might be yet to come for them.

For example, if you search for “Phones” and add the /android slash you’ll only get results for related to the Android operating system. Likewise, you can use slashed to manipulate the results in various ways, including selecting a date range, a political slant or only certain kinds of sites (forums, blogs, etc.).

Two of the more interesting slashes are /duptext and /domainduptext, which supposedly will check either a page or a domain’s content to find where it is being duplicated and how it is being misused. For webmasters, this could mean a powerful new tool for tracking duplicate content on the Web and tracking down those who are misusing their work.

So, as with other systems, I put it to the test and was, in a word, disappointed with the results. Though I think Blekko has a lot of potential in other areas, it doesn’t seem that duplicate content detection is one of its better uses, at least not at this time.

How Blekko’s Plagiarism Checker Works

Using Blekko’s duplicate content detection system is actually fairly easy. All one has to do is search for the URL they want to check the content of and then add the /duptext tag to the end of the URL.

For example:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/11/23/5-rules-for-the-next-plagiarism-scandal/ /duptext

You can do this with any page on the Web and the results are usually presented in a few seconds.

As you can see, it breaks out the information by hosts and URLs and, from there, based on those that are on-site and off-site. Below the chart is a list of links where the duplicate content is present.

You can also check an entire domain for duplicate content by looking for just the domain and adding “/domainduptext” to the end. For example.

plagiarismtoday.com /domainduptext

However, with this slash you get significantly less information, basically just a list of domains where your duplicate content is suspected of appearing and links to their SEO pages.

The question, however, is “How well does it work?” Unfortunately, after a few searches, the answer appears to be a disappointing one.

Testing it Out

As is typical with my tests, I decided to have Blekko do a duplicate content check on several works with a relatively known amount of plagiarism, 2 poems, one short story and one post on Plagiarism Today.

Here are the results of those tests:

Test 1: Poem 1

I tried out Blekko on an old poem of mine that I knew had seen widespread copying, both plagiarized and attributed. However, after performing the search, Blekko failed to find a single copy of the poem on any other site, even though a simple Google search finds about 40 results, though many are admittedly duplicates.

Blekko Results: 0 Google Results: 40

Test 2: Poem 2

Testing with another poem produced very similar results. However, this time Blekko didn’t even find duplicates on my site and instead simply indicated that there were no duplicates at all. However, once again, a simple Google search turned up about forty results though though, as with before, many were duplicates or copies on my domain.

Blekko Results: 0 Google Results: 39

Test 3: Story

Following the lack of luck with the two poems, I then tried an old short story of mine that had seen a small amount of copying. However, once again, Blekko failed to find any results that were not on my domain and a quick Google search turned a duplicate of the story on a DeviantArt account.

Blekko Results: 0 Google Results: 1

Test 4: PT Post

Finally, I tried an old, popular post from Plagiarism Today to see how well its content was detected. However, once again, Blekko failed to return any results and Google found a duplicate version of the piece on what appears to be a BlogSpot spam blog (one I was previously unaware of too).

Blekko Results: 0 Google Results: 1

Test 5: Whole Domain

Finally, in a bid to see what would happen if I ran my entire old literature domain through Blekko using the /domainduptext slash, it found only 6 offsite domains and 11 offsite URLs, even though many individual pieces see more reuse than that. It was missing many domains with widespread reuse of my work (legitimate and plagiarized) including blogspot.com, myspace.com and deviantart.com to name just a few.

Worse still, I couldn’t examine any of the individual links as clicking the link provided by Blekko just took me to the SEO page for that domain, not to a list of suspect URLs on the site or even to the domain itself.

In short, if I wanted to find out exactly how my content was used on these sites, it was up to me to find it.

Blekko Results: 11 Google Results: N/A

Other Issues

It became pretty clear that Blekko was missing a lot of duplicate content with its searches. My suspicion is that its because it tries to hone in only what it considers the best sites and cuts out spam blogs and other sites it deems to be of low value.

While this may be great for searchers, it creates a real problem when checking for duplicate content as these are often the exact sites you need to find.

However, that can’t be the only cause of the problem. If you use Blekko to do search for quotes from the relevant pieces, you get much more respectable results. Though the results aren’t nearly as good as Google in this area, they are definitely much more useful than via either of the slashes.

But the biggest problem is what one does after they find content reuse via Blekko. With the /domainduptext slash you can’t even access the individual URLs to investigate further. Using the /duptext slash is a much more robust tool, taking you to a page where the duplicate content is highlighted, but in the pages I did check the results were hit and miss, as many as half of the pages linked had no duplicate content at all.

All in all, as useful as Blekko is for other kinds of searches, or at least as useful as it might be, it doesn’t handle duplicate content searches very well, certainly no better than Copyscape or even regular Google.

Bottom Line

None of this is meant to be a slight against Blekko in any other regard. The other searches I did with it were actually pretty useful and, though I wasn’t swayed enough to change my default search engine, I did enjoy a lot of what Blekko had to offer and can see myself making some slashes for my use.

In the end though, it just isn’t a good tool for detecting plagiarism, copyright infringement or other kinds of duplicate content. Though the idea is solid and its integration with other SEO functions very appealing to some, it just isn’t accurate or complete enough at this time.

Still, as with other tools I’ve reviewed, there is hope for the future. But it remains to be seen if this will be a priority for Blekko, which is clearly targeting a more generic search audience. Duplicate content detection is a high-specialized skill and the tools to find a keyword on the Web aren’t the same as the ones to find an article on every site it appears.

As such, this will most likely remain a nice idea by a decent search engine that just isn’t practical.

It’s widely agreed that linking to sources where you got information is a good thing. Though attribution doesn’t play a major role in determining whether a use is an infringement (unless attribution is a requirement of the license), it can certainly be the difference between a webmaster taking action against a site or saying thank you for the link.

But the problem with linking source material is that people actually click those links and search engines also take them seriously as well. Giving attribution means that visitors will leave your site to visit the source and many will never return. Furthermore, links are not the most attractive things and many have tried to find a way to make them easier on the eyes.

Over the years, many have tried to find ways around these problems, often with very controversial results. The first, and best known, was the use of framing, which displayed the source link a box below a top banner for the site that provided the link. The practice has been extremely controversial and created such a backlash that even Digg was forced to relent with its experiment on framing.

However, now there is a new method that is starting to gain some traction and will likely be the subject of much conversation. It’s called Lightboxing and, though it isn’t widespread yet, it may be coming to a site near you.

What is Lightbox Linking

Note: I will not linking to or calling out any sites engaging in this practice. The one webmasters I spoke to about this practice has agreed to change it, if possible, as, according to him, he understands the risk of confusion among a minority of users and that the limited benefit is not worthwhile with that in mind. Also, to be especially clear, the Lightbox script nor its creator, Lokesh Dhakar, are involved in this in any way, instead it is just the style that is being used.

The lightbox effect has been around on the Web for a while but first reached popular use thanks to the Lightbox 2 script, which is designed to be used on galleries of images.

The way the lightbox effect works, when used with images, is that it grays out the Web page it is on, making it barely visible, and opens a larger version of the image on top of the gray. The idea is to give a clear way to view the larger image and still provide easy access back to the page it was on.

However, it was only a matter of time before people began to use the effect for other things as the lightbox could house just about anything. Recently, I began getting reports of sites using this effect to link to other sites and, recently, I saw it in the wild.

In this case, as well as others, rather than simply opening up the linked site directly or in a new window, the site instead used the lightbox effect, placing the content from the linked site in the center of the page.

This technique isn’t widespread, but given the controversies that have come from other non-traditional linking strategies, including the recent Diggbar controversy, it seems likely that many webmasters may take issue with it if it does reach the mainstream.

Comparisons to Framing

The most obvious direct comparison is framing. Framing is a practice that was extremely common, and controversial, in the late 90s and made a resurgence recently with the introduction and removal of the Diggbar.

On that front, there are many similarities. For one, Lightbox linking does display the linked site with logos and other materials from site that referenced it (even though those references are grayed out). Also, as with framing, the linked site is not displayed in the full of the browser and has to be “broken out” to take over the entire screen. Finally, as with framing, the linked site’s presence in the lightbox remains even after links are clicked. Finally, the URL bar continues to show the address of the site doing the linking, not the one the user is actually reading, the same as with framed content.

However, the technology behind lightbox linking is different. Where framing is done using frame tags, lightboxes rely upon CSS, and AJAX to work, this creates several key differences.

First, the links themselves are in the clear and SEO-friendly. Where framing links are links to the same domain that display outside content, lightbox links provide a straightforward link in the HTML that is only altered by the link’s class. Second, even though some of the logos and items from the original site are visible, they are not as clear or as confusing as with regular framing. Also, unlike with regular framing, the site doing the linking does not get an extra page view or ad exposure. Beyond the dubious benefit of keeping the visitor on the URL (versus just having them hit the back button), nothing is gained by linking in this way.

That being said though, in the implementation I saw, there was no easy way to remove the lightbox effect and open the linked site in a page of its own, that is, outside of opening a link within the box in a new tab. Also, the amount of screen real estate the linked site got in the lightbox seemed very small to me, making it hard to read the site and visit other sections.

Since this kind of linking is still fairly new, there aren’t a lot of people talking about it. However, it may be a conversation that needs to take place.

Legal Issues with Lightbox Linking

Since the comparison to framing is the best one available, we have to refer to the previous discussions about the legality of framing. The case law is extremely thin, with only one settled case dating to 1997, but there are two areas of concern among legal scholars.

1. Copyright Law: Though linking in this manner does not create a copy of the work, it may be seen as creating a new derivative work based up on it by adding the other material around it. However, that is definitely less the case here than with traditional framing, which adds must larger elements to the work.
2. Trademark Law: Finally, given the concern that some may mistake this kind of linking for an indication that there is a relationship between the two sites that does not exist, there is a potential trademark issue to weigh in.

Unfortunately, these issues are very unsettled as the law never adequately addressed framing issues in the 90s, when it was more common, and now there are many unanswered questions legally about any kind of non-traditional method of linking. This has the effect of casting a cloud over both those who want to engage in such linking and those that wish to protest it.

Bottom Line

The reason I write this article is not to vilify or accuse anyone of anything, but rather, to put the question out there: How would you feel if your site were linked in this way?

If you worry about such linking of your content, though I can not be sure without testing, it does appear that frame breaker scripts can defeat this kind of linking if desired.

But is it as serious of a concern as traditional framing? Is it a bigger one or a smaller one? Having only seen first hand one site doing it, I’m unsure if it is going to be wide-spread enough to be of much concern. The bigger question, however, is whether this is something webmasters and bloggers will take issue with and protest against.

That’s a question I am not wholly sure of.

Search engines, however, can provide a much better set of statistics than a site’s own timestamps. The only issue is that gleaning the needed information can be difficult. Fortunately, a relatively new Firefox plugin entitled Link Diagnosis helps with that by taking the dirty work out of determining when a page was indexed by Google.

The tool, while not perfect, can be a valuable asset when trying to determine approximately when a page appeared on the Web.

How it Works

Link Diagnosis is actually a robust plugin designed to analyze incoming links to a URL for SEO purposes. However, as one of its “hidden features” it is able to deteremine, approximately, the day the URL appeared in Google.

It works simply by having the user right click the page they want to check, select the “Get Page Age” option and, after a few seconds they are greeted with a JavaScript popup containing the date the script detected the site appeared.

It works by using Google’s INURL command which, when used in conjunction with a date filter, causes Google to display a date by each resulting URL. What the plugin does is take the URL you wish to check, create the search query and then automatically extract the applicable date, thus turning a multi-step process into a one-click solutions.

For anyone seeking to find out the date of a site, this could prove to be both a powerful tool and a good time saver as well.

Why to Use It

There are many reasons why you might want to check out the age of a particular page.

For one, you can use it to check if a spam blog or a plagiarist was indexed by Google before or after your original post (provided it was indexed at all). This can help determine what action you should take against the site.

However, many will also find its non-repudiation services to be very useful. If there ever is a dispute about who posted an article or an image first, this tool can help resolve it by providing an independent view on which went up first.

Though certainly not as accurate as Numly or MyFreeCopyright, using Google is far more accurate than looking at the Web Archive, especially considering that the latter can take over six months to display any information about a URL.

Still, Link Diagnosis is still far from perfect in this area. there are many issues one will have if one tries to rely upon this for non-repudiation.

Limitations

Before you begin to make heavy use of this service bear in mind the following caveats:

1. Google’s Limitations: The biggest issue of using the INURL method is that Google is not always index a site or a page immediately after it goes up. There are often delays. Also, the service can only work with pages already in the Google database, anything that has been blacklisted, either by the creator or by Google, will return no results.


2. URLs and Not Content: The function will tell you when the URL appeared in Google, not the content on the page. For permalinks that may be acceptable but dynamic pages, such as the front page of Plagiarism Today, it can create a problem.


3. Different Owners: Also, the system detects when a URL was first indexed by Google, not who owned it at the time. If a site changes ownership, even if it is taken out of Google during the transition, the date shown for the home page will be long to the original owner.

In short, the tools is subject to the exact same gaming and manipulation that Google and the other search engines are. As such, it can provide some quick and dirty information, especially on permalinks, but should never be taken as the ultimate gospel on the age of a page.

Link Diagnosis is no substitute for a true non-repudiation service and it does not claim to be.

Conclusions

Personally, I find the other features of Link Diagnosis much more compelling than its “page age” feature. Though it is great for a quick analysis, especially of a spam blog permalink, it may not always tell the complete truth or have the information you are seeking.

It is a great analysis tool but it should not be assumed to be the plain truth. There are plenty of ways that it could be wrong.

So, as with every tool, be sure to use it in conjunction with common sense and logic. Have it available, use it if needed, but don’t use it as a replacement for your own judgment.

No tool is that powerful.

However, a growing number of spammers have started taking a different approach to the problem. Instead of bathing a site with Adsense ads or spam links, they’ve begun using Amazon’s affiliate program to make money from their spam blogs.

Though not a traditional pay-per-click system, Amazon’s affiliate service makes it very easy for spammers to profit. By inserting a few links, they are able to get referral fees for items sold, in many cases days after the visitor was at the spam blog.

Given the current trend toward targeting technology and high-ticket prices, that amount could equal hundreds of dollars per sale and there is precious little that users can do to prevent spammers from earning the cash.

The Benefits of Amazon

For spammers, especially those targeting search terms for big ticket items, there are many reasons why Amazon would be a good “partner” for their sites.

1. Higher Rates: Though there is no promise that a click is likely or that such a click will result in a sale, one sale is likely worth many dozens of clicks in terms of dollar value. With Adsense and other PPC rates in constant fluctuation, Amazon’s referral service offers a very stable revenue stream.


2. Less Spammy: Where a slathering of Adsense ads may tip off even the most unaware visitor that something is wrong with the blog, nothing about a few Amazon links appears spammy to either humans or search engines.


3. More Trust: Amazon is a major brand name on the Web and well-trusted. People are much less likely to believe that Amazon would partner with purveyors of junk even though the major PPC systems are backed by companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.


4. Stickier: If you exit a spam blog by clicking an Amazon link you may think you are not giving them any money so long as you don’t buy anything. But it is possible, in some situations, that they could get the referral fee for items bought days or weeks later. There is no simple way to know if a purchase resulted in a referral fee being paid.


5. More Difficult Removal: Where the process for reporting spam bloggers to Adsense is well-known, the process for reporting to Amazon is less clear.

Given the nature of spammers to constantly seek out new methods and techniques, it was only a matter of time before began to reach out to Amazon in a more meaningful way. The benefits are just too great to ignore.

Challenges to Webmasters

When many content creators discover their work being misused by a spam blog, they almost immediately seek to attack the revenue side of the site. The theory is that is does more damage to the spammer than simply getting the content pulled down.

However, working with Amazon can be tricky. For one, it is not always obvious that a spam blog is using Amazon links as they are often disguised as other kinds of links.

But even if one does spot the Amazon links, it can be very difficult to report the matter to Amazon. Though Google’s Adsense DMCA policy is the subject of great controversy, it is at least an established protocol. Amazon has no such system in place.

Amazon does have a DMCA process, but it is unclear how it would apply in this case. Since Amazon isn’t actually hosting any material on the infringing site, as is the case with Adsense, there is no clear role for them to play. Furthermore, despite heavy searching of the Amazon site, I found no link for reporting an infringing affiliate.

Amazon, from an abuse standpoint, seems to be caught completely off-guard by this problem and has no real technique for resolving these issues.

This gives spammers at least a temporary edge if they use Amazon to turn their profits.

In the meantime though, the best that Webmasters can do is report infringing sites via the DMCA process and make it clear that they are reporting an affiliate, not a direct infringement of their content.

Hopefully, the complaint will make it to whoever is needed in order to act upon it.

Conclusions

Earlier this week, I wrote on the Blog Herald about assembling the spam puzzle and the need for cooperation to really make any progress on spam.

I was speaking exactly of this type of cooperation.

Amazon is a potential weak spot in the fight against spam. The service already has known weaknesses against affiliate hijacking and that has helped give rise to the spyware and malware problems we face today, weaknesses in dealing with junk content could be fueling the spam blogs we see tomorrow.

When a company gets as large and as powerful as Amazon or Google, it has the potential to do either incredible good or incredible harm. But even if a company tries not to be evil, failing to think like an evil doer means that their systems can be exploited.

Currently, we’re fortunate in that the problem seems to be limited mostly to technology blogs, especially those in gaming and computers, but it is very likely to spread.

This is especially true as Adsense either starts to push back more or rates begin to drop.

The question is, how will Amazon respond and will it be enough?

Note: I contacted Amazon prior to this article and did not hear back from them before publication. I will update this article should they respond.

However, in this case, the backdating was unlikely to fool anyone. The date shifting was so severe, usually spanning several weeks, that many of the entries on the spam blog were listed as posted before the events they described and, most likely, were allegedly posted on dates well before the search engine spiders made their last visits.

Still, it is not uncommon to see spam bloggers backdate their scraped posts more conservatively. From a shift of a few hours to account for time zone differences to a day or two to try and appear more legitimate, there are many reasons why a spammer’s post may appear to go up before your own.

Fortunately though, this is not a major worry for Webmasters. The timestamps we look at are all lies and both search engines and users know that to be the case.

Why Timestamps Lie

The problem with the timestamps provided by most major blogging platforms is that they are easily changed by users. There are many legitimate reasons why a blogger or Webmaster would want to alter a timestamp. You can forward date a post so that it publishes in your absence, pre-date the post so that it fits into a natural series with related items or set the date to an outlandish time so that it remains at the top of the page.

Even if there is no intentional manipulation of the timestamp by the author, it can still be wrong due to problems with the server, disagreements in time zone and other completely natural issues that can change the date a post or page is listed as going up.

For these reasons, search engines place very little faith in the timestamp of a post when determining which is the original. As such, spammers are unable to simply backdate their scraped posts and claimed the top spot in Google.

Fortunately, it is a bit more difficult that that.

It’s About Trust

If spammers could steal search engine thunder by simply backdating their posts, every spammer would be doing it. However, search engines place much more stock in how much trust the sites involve have and that is something much more difficult to obtain.

This is something that Andy Beard points out on his site. In a recent post on his blog, he responded to a previous post by David Naylor, using many of the same keywords. Though Beard’s post both came later and linked to Naylor’s post in the first paragraph, Beard’s site was able to claim the top spot in Google for a relative search term due solely to its search engine authority.

Though the story is anecdotal in nature, it illustrates how Google, and other search engines, award rankings. It is not based merely upon who is first, but rather, who is it trusts more and which site the search engines feels the reader would rather land on.

This makes backdating posts an ineffective tactic for gaining search engine ranking. If Google does not trust your site, it does not matter if your post appears to have come first or even if it truly did, you will not rank well for terms related to it.

While this is good news for many bloggers who are heavily scraped, there are other bloggers that have a great deal to worry about.

Spammer Trust

On the upside, if your site is well-established and is generally trusted by the search engines, it has a natural shield against scraping. Search engines are not likely to give a new site more authority than you on a topic, regardless of how they date their posts.

However, statistically speaking, most active blogs are fairly new and have not yet earned that level of authority. As such, they may be very vulnerable to scraping, especially considering that spam bloggers often leverage their networks to build up artificial authority. In the early months of a blog’s life, it is entirely likely that the spammers scraping its posts may have more authority and trust than the original posts, making it very hard for the site to find its footing.

In short, the problem with authority is that all sites start out with none and that makes them vulnerable to abuse from sites that have any, no matter how little.

Conclusions

Bloggers have very little to worry about from “clever” spammers that backdate their posts. The search engines place little to no faith in those timestamps and, most likely human readers don’t either.

The issue is not who came first, but who carries more trust. The Associated Press, for example, will always carry more trust than a one-month old blog and the fact that the blog backdates its posts is irrelevant.

In short, it is more important to cull and nurture this kind of relationship than it is to simply be first. This is not just a large part of what prevents spam bloggers from simply taking over the Web, but also part of the reason why new bloggers often struggle with scraping so much more severely than established.

It is very important to track and stop blog scraping, especially in the early months of a blog’s life, to further that trust and ensure that the spammers can not build an artificial reputation.

After all, the sword cuts both ways. If being first will not help the spammers, it will not help you either. Building and maintaining your authority level is the first and best step to protecting yourself against scraping, but it is one that requires both hard work on building your content and vigilance at keeping the spammers at bay.

The idea behind the test is simple. You type in the URL of your blog or site and it tells you the approximate reading level required to understand it. It got me curious about the readibility of this site so I decided to run PT through the program.

However, after completing the test, I discovered that it has a slightly more sinister side to it. In short, if one decides to embed the code into their site, they might discover an unexpected surprise.

Spam Links

To understand the problem let us compare first how the results are displayed on the original site:

With how it would appear if you embedded it on another site without first editing the provided code:

At the bottom you’ll see the difference, namely the naked link for “Fast Payday Loans”

The problem with this is pretty simple. Nowhere on the original site does the Webmaster disclose that this link is added and, unless you closely examine the provided HTML code, you will never even notice that it is there.

Many who use the tool, no doubt, have been tricked into adding that link to their site.

This can not only hurt their reputation among their visitors by associating the site with less-than-reputable sites, but also hurt your search engine ranking by connecting you with spammy sites and questionable content.

Clearly, this is one test, or at least one embed, to avoid.

Conclusions

Even though this isn’t a content theft matter, I know many of the readers of this site are very interested in spam issues apart from scraping and spam blogging.

I wanted to take a moment to warn everyone about this rather “sneaky” way of injecting links into a site and encourage everyone who does post these kinds of tests to be extra careful of the code you copy.

Your best bet, most likely, is to look through the code carefully for anything suspicious (with this code the reference to “Payday Loans” tripped my radar) and always preview the code offline before publishing it live.

Personally, I just plan to avoid posting these results to my site, even if occasionally one is interesting enough to take.

According to Attributor, the system “works by allowing publishers to register and digitally fingerprint each piece of content” and then checking for uses of that content that violate previously determined rules for use. The system can then take action against any misuse of the content, including requesting a link back or filing a takedown notice.

The enterprise version, which is what Attributor is taking customers for at this time, costs tens of thousands of dollars per year to operate according to TechCrunch. A different version of the service aimed at individuals and bloggers should be available some time in 2008.

Also, according to the TechCrunch article, Attributor is currently indexing over 100 million pages per day and has already indexed over 15 billion. The current system only works with text but an image detection system is in early beta and audio/video detection is also planned.

Clearly, Attributor could be a game-changer in this industry and this will be a product to keep track of and follow as it grows.

Content Analysis

In a separate announcement, Attributor unveiled the results of an analysis the company did on the copying and pasting of song lyrics.

The results of the analysis found that song lyrics are copied widely on lyric sites, fan sites and blogs and that very few are officially licensed. What was surprising was that the only official source studied, Yahoo! Music, was ranked behind all of the unofficial copies in Google and almost all in their own search engine.

Other tests done by Attributor, including one revolving around the recipe site Epicurious, have found similar results. In that study, over 10,000 copies were found and over half had a higher search engine rank than the originals. Also, over half of the sites had ads on the pages and 60% failed to link back to the source.

Though these results are not likely to be a surprise to anyone who reads this site regularly, it is an embarrassment for Google, which has repeatedly said that it can distinguish between copies and originals. In a blog post in December 2006, they said, “Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites (scrapers) can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google.”

Apparently Google’s accuracy in this area leaves a great deal to be desired. This may explain some of Attributor’s harsh words for Google, calling it “unacceptable to publishers”, and why some feel that an Adsense lawsuit is on the horizon.

Conclusions

Attributor has the potential to be a major game-changer in this field. It is already making its impressions on the enterprise level and has signed on many prominent customers, including both the AP and Reuters, but it remains to be seen what impact it will have to individuals and bloggers.

Since the single user version of Attributor is not slated until some time in 2008, we will have to simply wait and see.

In the meantime, we are forced into a choice between paying high dollar for an enterprise or academic solution and using a hodgepodge of limited but free services. Though it is possible to track and monitor one’s content very well using the currently available means, it is growing more and more time restrictive as the Internet, along with the misuse of content, grows by the minute.

The value of a system like Attributor is not just its ability to detect more reuse of content, to organize it in a way that is maintainable and offer solutions that are practical. If Attributor can do that, then real progress will be made in protecting content on the Web.

Regardless, this is a company to follow and to watch.

Disclaimer: I am a consultant for Attributor.

This has lead some to wonder if fighting plagiarism is more about revenge than practicality. To some, it is better to simply forget about the plagiarists, ignore the emotional response and go about one’s business.

But as tempting as ignoring the problem is, it doesn’t look at the consequences of inaction. Though we might like the idea of covering our eyes and looking the other way, doing absolutely nothing can be detrimental to one’s success online.

Practical Implications

Though it is tempting to look at fighting plagiarism as nothing but an irrational knee-jerk reaction, considering the following issues that might arise from not taking action.

• Search Engine Penalties: Though disagreements remain about the duplicate content penalty (possible nsfw) as it pertains to scraping, one penalty is certain, increased competition. Even if there is no algorithmic “penalty” placed on your site, the plagiarists will still show up for in your keyword results. For example, if you had a keyword unique to your site, you’d be number one for certain. If you were plagiarized six times, you’d be just one of seven, possibly not even first.
• Business Concerns: If you run a business, plagiarism hits much harder. You spent a great deal of time and/or money coming up with your site’s content, if someone steals it, they avoid those expenses. This means they can offer their products cheaper and enjoy higher profits. That translates to money out of your pocket.
• Reputation Issues: If you’re a new artist and you leave plagiarism unchecked, some will believe that you are the one stealing the content, not the others. This can make it hard to grow a following and establish a reputation on the Web.
• Destroys Market Value: If a work is widely plagiarized, its market value is destroyed and any attempts to sell it will be thwarted. Many artists have to create new works specifically for interested buyers just to counter the damage that plagiarism has done to the original.
• Missed Promotional Opportunities: In some cases, distributing free, attributed copies of your work to other sites, such as through a Creative Commons License, can be a great promotional tool. However, if plagiarized copies spread out first, the promotional opportunity is destroyed.

These are just some of the bigger, more important, reasons that fighting plagiarism is not purely an emotional exercise, but rather, a necessary step to protect and grow your Web site in today’s Internet climate.

Excuses… Excuses…

Even with that evidence, many still claim that fighting plagiarism is not practical. They feel that it takes too long, costs too much money or is too distracting. To them, they would be better of spending their resources on other aspects of their site.

However, as I’ve shown before, the best tools for fighting plagiarism are completely free and no case of plagiarism should take longer than twenty minutes.

If you can’t spare twenty minutes from time to time to protect your content, you might want to seriously rethink posting it on the Web.

Of course, the number one honest reason I hear from people about why they do not protect their content more is that they do not know how. If that’s the case, then that is why this site is here and why I am here. If you have a plagiarism question, feel free to email me or post your question to the Performancing forums.

I will gladly help any way that I can.

Conclusions

Being plagiarized is a very emotional experience, ask anyone who has been through. But because something invokes a great deal of intense feeling does not mean there is no logic behind stopping it. Logic and emotion do not always agree, but they are not mutually exclusive either.

Your content is valuable. If it is worth enough for you to create and then post on the Web, then it is almost certainly valuable enough to warrant spending the few minutes needed to protect it.

If you need help, there are resources, including this site, available to you.

Regardless, we have long passed the point where covering our eyes and hoping the problem will go away is an effective solution. Denial is overrated, the time for action is now.