Copying & Pasting the Moz Glossary onto my site.. is this white hat or black hat?
-
Hi,
I run a small business writing optimised content for small businesses in Melbourne.
I want to add a Glossary page to my website that lists all of the different words associated with website marketing and SEO.
I found the Moz glossary and I am wondering if it would be a bad idea to copy and paste the list straight into a page on my site. I'd prefer to not have to reword all of the descriptions as it will take me ages and I don't want to compromise the information in the descriptions.
Here is a link to the Glossary: http://moz.com/blog/smwc-and-other-essential-seo-jargon
Obviously I don't want to do the wrong thing ethically or from Google's perspective.
Any advice would be great.
-
well said
-
Hi Meaghan, happy to help! I was actually referring to Hutch 42's advice above, in this thread. (The anchor link to his response to your question is http://moz.com/community/q/copying-pasting-the-moz-glossary-onto-my-site-is-this-white-hat-or-black-hat#reply_270109.)
-
Thanks Christy.
Could you provide me with a link to Hutch42's advice as you mentioned? I Googled it but I got mixed results.
Meaghan
-
Hi there, thanks for your question. Yes, this would be a very bad idea. Duplicate content issues aside, copying content and passing it off as your own is plagiarism. This is unethical and violates copyright law. If you are interested in publishing someone else's work on your site, you are both legally and ethically obligated to obtain their permission to do so, and then properly attribute to work to the original creator if granted permission to republish it. Rather than going this route, however, your time would be better spent implementing Hutch42's advice. (That is, create your own authoritative content that will naturally earn links, show off your content creation skills, and rank in organic search engine results.) Best of luck!
Christy
-
So if I were to reword the sentences in my own words, would that still be ethical?
-
I mean, I guess you could borrow it. Better give Moz some link love though :)... and I wouldn't expect great rankings for that long term.
I would think it better to use their glossary as inspiration and then put your own spin on a version of it.
-
First of all, I did not once say I would not credit it as being written by Moz. In fact, I every time I mention Moz (and how awesome it is) I provide a link to the Moz website.
The reason I don't want to rewrite it is because I don't want to lose the accuracy in the descriptions.
Secondly, if I was intending on 'stealing' anything, why would I bother asking the Moz community about the ethics of using content written by Moz? I am obviously aware that copying and pasting is not ethic in nature but given that this is a glossary and Moz are the experts on technical terms, I thought there might be a way of working around this so that I can use the proper definitions without my visitors having to navigate away from my website.
So thanks for your friendly response.
-
So you are asking on Moz if you should steal content from Moz then not credit them to increase your search ranking, and then your concern is not if what you are doing is wrong (it is) but only if Google will penalize you for it? I believe that if you want content for your site you should make it or pay for it, not steal it, if you write optimized content then maybe people would expect copy on your site to be written by you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blogging , do I create a huge blog which links to all my sites
Blogging , do I create a huge blog which links to all my sites or do i create a blog on each site, or do i guest blog to each site from other peoples blogs 😞 which is best ?
Content Development | | SocialAssist1 -
Duplicate Content & Tags
I've recently added tags to my blog posts so that related blog posts are suggested to visitors. My understanding was that my robot.txt was handling duplicate content so thought it wouldn't be an issue but after Moz crawled by site this week is reported 56 issues of duplicate content in my blog. I'm using Shopify, so I can edit the robot.txt file but is my understanding correct that if there are 2 or more tags then they will be ignored? I've searched the Shopify documents and forum and can't find a straight answer. My understanding of SEO is fairly limited. Disallow: /blogs/+
Content Development | | Tangled
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b0 -
How do I stop someone from hijacking my site?
I had lost a lot of search engine rankings & it almost put me out of business. I worked a lot on the site in April and in May my sales rebounded 37%+ almost back to where they typically are. I have blamed Panda and saw another Panda update in May and my traffic is declining again. Today I happened to decide to check what pages were being indexed and I also noticed that when I published an update this morning it said the page "<cite class="_Zd">www.cheaptubes.com/index2.asp</cite>" exists on the destination server but not in current site and it asked if I wanted to delete it. I said no at the time but am going to delete it right after this question. I went to google & put "site:cheaptubes.com" into the search. My website has about 50 pages but google has "About 2,160 results" @ 10X per page. The first four pages are mostly my pages but I noticed even on the first page, 3rd result was for Nike shoes and it isn't my site. Someone has hacked my site and put up over 21,000 pages! That must be the real reason behind my website problems, right? How do I stop this from happening again? Is this having the negative effect that I fear it is?
Content Development | | cheaptubes1 -
Does aggregating content hurt your moz / google rank?
I have a news section on my site that I aggregate from multiple RSS feeds. They are stored on my site and I have sitemap that links to them. Is this a negative thing to do? Since its overall duplicate content to another site, it may be a strike against me. Should I just leave it as an updating feed and not keep the articles visible on my site?
Content Development | | BrickPicker0 -
How many categories should you have within a blog / Wordpress Site for SEO?
Hi Guys I am just wondering whether or not for SEO purposes it is better to have a small number of categories for your blog posts to fit into as opposed to numerous ones. The reason I ask is that I have one site which is fairly new to the search engines - 8 months old which has 7 general categories within the blog for instance "rail contractors", "railway construction" "airport construction" etc I have another site which is 10 years old which has built up 25 different types of categories for instance brand design, brand development, brand management (i guess you could put all these under 1 category "branding"? We've been writing lots of press for both sites... yet the younger site is getting more coverage on Google page 1. Would this be because the blogs / press are more concentrated under a specific category as opposed to being spread thinly throughout the site? Any help would be appreciated. Debs 🙂
Content Development | | lethalmarketing0 -
Typepad.com blog migration & duplicate content
I've migrated a typepad.com blog with a bunch of content (but little traffic) onto a hosted WordPress site under my own domain name (the way I should've done it in the first place). Now I don't want to confuse Google that the new site is duplicating content from the other site, so would I be better off with: 1) meta-refresh redirecting each typepad.com post to the same post on the new blog, or 2) just killing the typepad.com blog entirely so Google will not find duplicate posts anywhere. In favor of #2 is the fact that these posts get very little traffic today. I figure I will lose more traffic from duplicate content ranking penalties than from losing the posts themselves in the original blog. What do you think?
Content Development | | chriscrabtree0 -
URL structure on moving from old nukedit site to Drupal
I am currently rebuilding a site in Drupal. The old site was in Nukedit and all the urls end in .asp. Given the new urls will not end in .asp is there any point in matching the rest of the url or will using 301 redirects (to better seo'd pages) be sufficient to minimise any (temporary) ranking loss?
Content Development | | chunki0 -
Name Some Ecommerce Sites That NAIL Blogging
Have a few favorites but would like to get some other people's opinions on some ecommerce sites that are doing blogging RIGHT. Who is supporting their online marketing with an amazing blog? One of my favorites is Backcountry.com's The Goat (http://thegoat.backcountry.com/) Let me know!
Content Development | | GManSEO1