Duplicate, Autogenerate, Scrape and Copy Content?

Bet you liked that last blog post eh? Made loads of sense?  It's also probably not the first time you've seen a page of content
that sounded that great. And linked out a billion times to somewhere else. Or was copied from your website. It's what bad people do (or used to do) to get good rankings - back when SEO wasn't about generating business, but instead was about generating rankings.

Sadly, people still use this tactic to build content for sites, whether it's content for their own sites or for a bunch of cookie cutter shell sites or splogs (spam blogs) for the purpose of linking. It's always a bad idea to steal content, or steal content and "spin it" with software that kind of rewrites it in a less coherent format and here's why:

1. Stealing content is a copyright violation. 

If you copy content word for word you can get served with a legal notice or your hosting company (and Google) might get a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown request and you'll end up in legal trouble and with no website - or no website in Google.

2. Search engines want unique content.

If you use somebody else's content, no matter how good it is, search engines will still only rank one version - the original. Let's face it, if you're stealing, you don't have a very authoritative website so it won't rank (or won't rank for long). It won't help  you. Not at all. You may as well write an original page.

3. It's bad for users.

People who land on your website are looking for something. If you give them keyword rich gibberish, they won't be finding what they want so they will leave. Sure, you may rank well for whatever (SEO Manchester) term you're targeting (James "insatiable copywriter" Roome) but it won't make any difference to  your business. Except people may remember you for being spammy and annoying. That's not exactly good branding though, is it?