Plagiarism

January 1st, 2005

Pla • gia • rize v. -to use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one’s own. (from dictionary.com)

Notice I gave my source? Everytime you take something from another author you’re required to credit them; even if that author is a website. If I hadn’t, it might have been one of the weirdest cases of Plagiarism ever.

I was recently doing a presentation at work about the power of using article syndication to get traffic to your websites. I searched Google for a recent article I had written called “Does Google have a Sandbox?”. (if you Google that you should see about 100 results for my article)

Anyway, the first article I had clicked on was credited to a person named Kritika, and my biography had been replaced with a link to a Porn Pills and Poker site. Needless to say it had killed my presentation.

After sending a cease and desist letter to this website, I found out that the “Kritika” article was in fact on a bunch of websites. How could this be?

I used a syndicate called GoArticles.com to get my article out there, and it worked rather well. It seems this Kritika person just copied my article, change a few words, (mainly my URLs and names with his) and re-submitted it to GoArticles.

The sites getting the content had no idea it was stolen (sorry to those of you I contacted).

Anyway, Kritika has now been banned from GoArticles, so there is a good side to the story.

But seriously people, free content IS free. Just make sure you give credit where credit is due.

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