Thread: Credit Due - Article Spinning / Marketing and Content Regurgitaters

To me, it's a little unsettling for a site that discourages piracty of intellectual property (music and software) and prides itself on giving 'credit-where-credit-is-due' to let this go unchecked.


Have you noticed how every few months we here at RO are graced with a new expert on music marketing in the Music Business forum? (often with a perfectly friendly or feminine sounding handle) They usually offer vaguely reassuring posts on old threads. The helpful hints usually contain a nugget or two of generally accepted truth and/or wisdom, but usually have an oddly disjointed syntax or train of thought. It's not quite off-topic, but not exactly on-topic either. Too coherent to be a conventional spambot, but often littered with random capitalization and punctuation errors in an otherwise well-written piece. And if you've read all of their posts you'll notice odd contradictions in their other opinion(s) and changes in their writing skills.




Although much of this information is presented as professional first-hand knowledge/experiences - it is not original content written in reply to the OP's posted topic, nor is it credited to any other author(s). But with a little Googlization, you'll quickly find most of them are old content from other sites. And you'll find either the verbatim articles, (which should be credited to a variety of other authors). Or you'll find single sentences, or other fragments parsed and reassembled to almost make a point regarding the topic. I find that particularly ironic on licensing and copyright topics.




Or for example, to pick just one of many, this recent post #132 on this thread.
(Drivel intentionally not quoted to avoid any additional cross-reference to the site from which it came.)


Can someone (preferably the posting member) please go through this line by line and elaborate on how building a 'professional' studio is a real money saver. Or, how 'pacing' saves money making equipment purchases.




Oh wait.... Perhaps you would like to reference the primary article those disjointed sentences were boosted from - written (maybe?) by a self-proclaimed "E xpert on A rticle M arketing" and what's known as "A rticle S pinning". In other words, techniques and/or software that rewords and regurgitates content to improve someone else's Search Engine Rankings for their own cash gain - or to take credit for others' writing. Swap out enough words and it's hard to say definitively who the original author might be - so I'm reluctant to mention anybody's name.


Google any one sentence from the linked How To Save Money ... thread, with quotation marks, and see where it points you. If you google the whole sloppy mess, it will be harder to track. Just search the last sentence in quotes, and you'll find the rest.


They all track back to the same article which advocates 'soundproofing' your room or basement and in their exact words, "viola! an instant recording studio for you!" Plagiarism (alleged) aside, that should still offend a number of you for a wide variety of reasons. Can any old basement be modified to do adequate voiceover work for your self-promoting online marketing video? Sure. ( FYI that is what the 'pacing' sentence refers to when read in context with the entire article - pacing your vocal delivery while recording ) Does 'soundproofing' make your basement a professional studio? Nope. So we're left to debate whether the word 'professional' includes any level of skill, knowledge, or craftsmanship - or if it only indicates money has changed hands at least one time.


Now before someone comes in to bust my chops for not credited any authors, I'd like to give the members involved a chance to clarify their position(s) and tell us what they represent and why. Until then, I've deliberately not linked or credited the pages or authors.


I understand how link mining, link-exchanges, work to improve search engine rankings. I'm not sure yet who benefits from "Article Spinning" here when there are no back-links. Do they post a link in their profile, or signature, later that helps drive traffic or improve their SEO? Does the redundant info out there in interweb land raise their legitimacy as an expert? I don't know - I'm asking.




To be clear:
It's not that the thoughts and opinions are without merit, or uninformative, but let's be up-front about the source and the motivation behind them.




Please feel free to independently research these topics if you don't know what I'm talking about:
Article Marketing
Article Spinniing



Discuss....

FYI. For a few years I've been monitoring and comparing where our traffic, and other forums like ours is coming from. Its part of my optimizing and how I take care of our community content. The majority of our traffic is from the America's, UK and other parts of Europe. Every morning and night I go through new registrations and remove these bots followed by blacklisting blocks of ip addresses coming from those countries. Most of our rivals shows their highest traffic is coming from from Asia. Those bots help their global rank but not the level of information being posted in those forums. I was told by someone of high profile I shouldn't block these countries because it would effect our rank. At this point in history, Whomever wants to be popular in those countries can have it. Nothing but BS.

I look forward to better internet transparency and tools that help the best sites rise above this all.

Originally Posted by bouldersound

I've seen ones that simply paste a quote from earlier in the thread.

yup, good eye, that's a common whey they do it but now they are getting smarter and posting like this last one. The new Bots are going to be doing this now. We're going to have to start blocking countries.