Please Take My Content!

Giving away content to thwart theft

[ymkg]

I recently stumbled across several sites that have copied some of my content. Since this discovery was purely accidental, I assume that I will find many more instances if I really look around.

I went through the usual debate with my business partner about what approach to take, i.e., cease and desist, stern email, stern letter, stern certified letter, nice phone call, threatening phone call, etc, etc. Then it hit us.

Why not give all of our content away? There would be no charge as long as the user gives us the appropriate credit via a link to our site, i.e., "Information Provided by www.oursite.com." There may be some other minor conditions, but the basic gist is "use our content as long as you let everyone know where you got it from."

With the amount of WW postings about content theft, there has to be a massive demand for quick and easy access to high quality content for new and growing sites.

Anyone see any pitfalls? One that comes to mind is a dupe content penalty of some kind. But there must be some sort of solution to that or all of the syndicated news feeds from the likes of AP and others would run into problems?

[401khelp]

Be sure that you also require that your copyright notice be maintained and displayed with the content. Also require that the link to you (as in: "Information Provided by www.oursite.com.") be a live link so people can click on it and pop to your site.

We provide free content regularly to certain major financial informational based sites. It has been good exposure for us, drives some traffic to us, and helps generate good quality links back to us. We also had one major site that put our logo (a small one) on each page of our content.

[rogerd]

Offering your content for free may make sense in some situations, particularly with appropriate limits (no more than two articles per site, for example).

One obvious downside - you might get outranked by your content-users. I have that situation on one site right now. An unauthorized thief took content from a site, and outranks the original page for a few keywords. The original page was just an article, not optimized, and I'm sure I can tweak it back to #1. It's annoying to have to do that.

Some sites may have content sufficiently unique that overexposure is undesirable, too.