Copywriting Is Not Copy My Writing
So I'm writing a fancy-schmancy piece on worldwide freelancing and futuristic hiring trends one day last week. I take several hours, and four cups of joe, to script this fine piece mixing rhetoric with factual information, slap a home-made image to it, and publish it to my blog. Not even two hours later - since Google picks up my feed instantly and displays the new works - I find the same piece mashed up on another website created to harvest links, traffic or whatever-you-call-it. I was outraged. Unfortunately, it was a link farm; no accurate contact information was available. This spurned my current debate whether or not copywriting has become a cantankerous quagmire of whose writing belongs to who. By the way, I deleted the piece off my site so at to not penalize my rankings.
Much like the dangers and delights of freelance journalism which I researched before I wrote, I'm noticing that writing has seemingly become similar to entering a foreign battle zone with a butter knife while waiting to get your head sawed off by freedom fighters. Putting your pen name to well-scripted pieces is becoming useless; copywriting your blog only makes you look important since posts can be backdated easily should you argue if your writing is authentic. The only plausible method one can use to protect their work is leaving an original copy on Word and keep a date stamp appended to the piece. Even then, however, the ring leader of Hackaholics Anonymous will hold a meeting on your hard drive and take what they deem is their own original works.
It seems that aggressive content 'farms' believe that spinning your once original content will fool Google, Yahoo or MSN into thinking they have great work, viable references and interior linking which epitomizes search engine optimization. Fortunately for you, my wayward writing soul, the Big Three have become hip to writing styles, recognizing which sites produce what, and who is actually trying to play 'games' with algorithmic calculations used to indext content across the web. The very thought of my sensible writing work being mashed into something senseless still makes my lunch work it's way back up north.
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