I have a client who would like to have a blog running with current news and events taking place in his city. However, as he does not have the time to actually write all the blog entries himself, and many are related and found on various news sites ( BBC, CNN as well as local sites ), is the following something that is allowed ??? To use an article from a local newspaper site ( use it word for word ), and include a link back to the site from which he took it ?? As blogging is something I know next to nothing about, I was wondering if anyone can shed some light if this kind of thing is allowed ?? He won't be claiming that the articles are his - he would just like to display them in his blog, along with information and a link as to where the article came from ?? Any advice would be most appreciated. Thanks Alex
Technically speaking there is nothing wrong, look for many threads on 'autoblogging' and 'rss feeds'. But ethically speaking those blogs are frowned upon as they are just copies of other sites. People don't like them and search engines like them even less. Google, for example, 'matches' contents and will rank your article very poorly if it is a copy of another, (bigger), site. In other words, it is not advised to do it, you will make no money and the site will rank very poorly. BTW, I know that _some_ people claim to do very well with auto blogs, but they are in a specialized nice, (news is not one of those), and/or have found ways of 'changing' their articles enough to fool search engines. FFMG
As FFMG already mentioned, due to the duplicate content, the blog might not do good in terms of rankings. However, if you do some social bookmarking or promotion to get a steady stream of traffic to it, it may get popular among the readers.
These all are autoblogs and you can setup an autoblog to drag feeds from those news site and display 1 paragraph from them and for next para place a link to another site. And in the header u can make CNN says this. But this won't help your blog grow as soma one said above. So what the best type of autoblog u can do is for a specific news display what CNN says what BBC says and at last 4-5 lines would be written by your client....this type of thing can be set easily using some autoblog stuffs i think...
so he basically wants to steal other people's work and say it is his? Why not find a topic you can actually write about and be original with instead of stealing. Yes it is stealing - if you put your original work on your site and someone uses it as their own without any quotes it is stealing. Just like if you write a book and someone copies it word for word and markets it as their own.
The OP clearly said he was not going to claim the work as his. He did say that he was going to give links back. And I _think_ that some news agencies are more than happy to let you use their feeds. But that only applies to news really. FFMG
if you take an entire post and put it on your site and have a link back atthe end why would someone need a link back? You want to write a post - blockquote a section with a link to the full story - and comment on the story that is fine - but to use an entire article is just the lazy person's way of trying to make money off of someone else's work
Auto blogging is perfectly acceptable in many areas. Simply check the terms and conditions of the site and feed. Lots of people talk about duplicate content and really have no idea what they are talking about. The duplicate content issue applies to people using duplicate content on their own site to try and trick the search engines. News sites are nearly all duplicate content as they get most of it from Roytrers or one of the news services. It is encapsulated in their own site with different headers, meta tags and other content so mostly will not be targeted as duplicate. Gee if that was not the case most news and sports sites would be dumped. I actually did a test, which is what you should do before you make a statement or decision, and set up 30 similar blogs and auto blogged the exact same content to them all. They all have their own domain names and headers etc but the content is the same on all. Do a search for Kalorama Holly Lodge Dandenong Ranges Victoria which was posted in August so Google has done the latest upgrade and if I was going to be penalized then I should have dropped dramatically but you will see I have the blogs listings all over the place. Just look for a domain with discover or bigg or accommodation-something. 8 listing in the top 5 pages with positions 2 and 3 on the first page being part of that blog series. Ok break it down even more to just Kalorama Holly Lodge and I am still no 3 with 5 listing on the first 4 pages and climbing. People just miss the power of blogging and how you can dominate a listing. Add to that I am also making sales and so most of what has been said is all hear say as I have proved that auto blogging works and is great for seo and also financially rewarding. Quentin
As a blog host I am more than familiar with Duplicate contents. I run handful more than 30 blogs. The examples you gave are a perfect example of a niche and as I mentioned in my first reply some of those do work. FFMG