Hi Everyone, I am thinking of developing a website which will be news based, featuring international news stories with regular updates on a daily basis. My question is before I start developing the site, I am confused about the content I can place on the site. By this I mean am I allowed to take a news article from another website and "spin" it as such to create my own article on the website or would you think it's better to put the article in its original content on my website, with a link to the website source? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks James
I don't know very much about copyrights of news websites, but the spinned text will be more efectively, because it will be more unique than a copied text. And you have a chance to be higher than the website from wich you copied, if you will add more keywords or do better seo. And when you add a link you add "reputation" to website and you don't have a chance to be higher in SERP than another website. So you decide, i am for copywriting.
Thanks for your replies guys, anyone else have any thoughts? Guess I also need to consider pictures to go along with the article/story, this could be challenging as well.
I tried a site like this for a while. I got fairly good rankings and even the attention of Google Trends by writing editorial style articles about the news stories and going into greater detail. For example, one of the articles was about a food recall that was announced long after most people would have eaten the food anyway. My piece was about the futility of the recall, considering the problem was known about a week after the food was shipped but not announced until 2 months later. The food in question was fresh carrots. The site's been down/gone for around 2 years and I now use the domain for testing, yet the Google bot and other bots still come around looking for the carrot recall and other articles. The site was broken by my webhost at the time. I just was never able to monetize the site well-enough to equal the amount of effort that went into each article. I suspect I got a little too caught up in trying to be Paul Harvey and find "the rest of the story." The research was great fun but the time I spent on each piece was just plain dumb. Whatever you do, be very careful about the images you use. The UK has some very strict and IMHO ridiculous copyright laws when it comes to photographs. With my approach, you could use any image of carrots or something to represent futility or stupidity instead of the actual product image from the news story.
Spinners create shit articles. You want repeat visitors. You want them to come back time after time. THAT is where the money is. You think having crappy content will have them coming back? You can do one of two things: 1. Just put in a blurb on the news articles. This is legal. Post, say, one fourth of it, and then comment on it to put in more info. Take a sentence here, take a sentence there...put it altogether.... If you are a great commentator, this may be a good option for you. Many times people love reading commentaries more so than the actual articles. These days, many only want to read a little bit anyway. You could call it, "James' Blurbs." 2. Contact amateur writers who write on such subjects to see if they will write for you for a backlink. THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX! You could also just write very short articles. Like this one: http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.reuters.com/anne-hathaway-jessica-biel-batman-shortlist-reuters Take some bits and pieces out of it, put it in your site, comment on it, and, voila! A good article! You can find inexpensive pictures on stock photo sites. Many sell pics for only a few bucks a piece. Do a search for stock photos. You also have Google images. Just give credit underneath the picture to the original owner. That is, IF you know who it is. If they object to it, which RARELY happens, take it down. Hell, most pics out there are years old, and the owners have long since forgotten about them, so....