I like to start my morning finishing up any Words with Friends games before my feet hit the floor. I need a moment to wake up and adjust and 10 minutes on my phone playing a game or reading the news is a good way to start.
This morning an article on USA Today talked about Rand Paul and plagiarism. It immediately made me think of AR. Not a good thing, right?
Rachel Maddow called Paul out for ripping off sentences from a Wikipedia entry on a movie called "Gattaca" in a speech of his. In the article you can read the Wikipedia entries alongside Paul's speech quotes. They are quite similar if not exactly the same. Clayton, a professor at the University of Louisville had a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "When you do something like this, it damages (your) credibility".
I can't tell you a day that goes by where I don't get a concerned member bringing my attention to a possible plagiarist. I'm not even going to count the amount of tickets and calls Member Services receives. This is no joke and we take it very seriously.
Not only is it illegal, those who are blatantly ripping off sources and posting it as their own content hurts ActiveRain. It damages our ranking authority with Google which in turns hurts those who are using our platform who follow the rules. And that really chaps my hide. From the AR Community Guidelines: "Do not plagiarize content from another source and publish it as your own. You must obtain explicit permission from the original source to republish, and give reference to such within the body of your post. Permission to re-print is NOT the same as permission to re-publish. This also applies to publishing real estate listings that are not your own."
I like to give the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes a new member or new blogger doesn't know that they can't use someone else's work. You may be rolling your eyes right about now, but we are a community of trust so let's not go there. Other times, they do have proper and direct authorization to use the content but are unaware of the rules about sourcing it within their blog post and checking the 'This is not my content but I have permission to post it' box. We don't award points for unoriginal content. We don't feature unoriginal content (or at least try not to, sometimes we make errors).
The point is, if you're not 100% sure, don't use it. What kind of SEO are you really getting from an article that has already been published elsewhere? It's already been indexed by Google so do yourself a favor and try this method: Grab a snippet from the article, link to it, and then write your own take on it. How does it relate to your world, your market or your experience? You'll get a lot farther with your readers and Google by practicing this method.
Oh and if you're a Words with Friends fanatic like myself, and aren't afraid of getting your butt whooped, my username is kerrielil.
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