content snippet theft

a job for the truly untalented

[RFranzen]

As far as I know, no one has taken any of my articles or significant content and used it elsewhere. However, there are several sites of which I am aware that copy 2- or 3-sentence snippets, glue them into a paragraph with snippets from other places, and hope to fool the search engines that the site contains actual content instead of just ads.

It doesn't bother me too much. Anybody who goes to one of the sites and tries to read anything will realize it is nothing but nonsense. Anybody who ignores the text and buys stuff from there anyway probably deserves whatever cr*p they end up with.

I'm more curious than anything else. Does this happen often? Are people actually able to make money on the net by offering nonsensical garbage? If it ever did begin to bother me, would it be worthwhile to spend significant effort trying to get them to stop?

-- Rich

[EileenC]

I'd like to know, too, if people buy from these websites. There's that whole market segment that pays writers a whopping $5 per 1000 word article just to get high SE rankings. Trouble is, it isn't written in any way that makes it easy for humans to read, much less persuade them to buy. I'm fully confident that the copy I write would stand up against anybody's cut-and-paste, 1-cent a word stuff any day, and come out far ahead on the ROI.

On the other hand, methinks there must be something to it, because it seems to be a thriving industry, judging by how many writers have work doing this and how many people hire them.

I just know that as a consumer, a business loses me pretty quickly if they've got poorly written web copy. I figure if they don't care enough to present a professional image to the market, they aren't really professionals. I immediately perceive them as selling shoddy goods and snake oil, probably with the get-rich-quick-on-the-internet mentality, and most likely with unreliable customer service.

[BigDave]

I'd like to know, too, if people buy from these websites.

I think they are depending on the illiterate masses that just look at a picture and look at the price.

If you get 10 times the traffic of a well put together site with real text, but because of your lousy copy your conversion rate is 1/5, you are still getting twice as many sales.

It is the basic SPAM principal. Sening out 10,000,000 emails a day costs almost nothing, and you can turn a profit if you only sell to a fraction of 1%. Get high enough traffic and it doesn't matter that your conversion rate sucks.