That Darn New-Fangled Hyperlink

Posted on September 24, 2007
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Running a website, it is easy to get lost in the day to day running of content creation, the various checks and testing that need doing periodically, creating blog posts(!) etc and forget sometimes about the bigger picture and how we can have an effect, however small, for good or <melodrama>evil</melodrama> within that bigger picture.

This blog entry has been prompted by just (within the last hour) inadvertently coming so close ( / \ this close) to doing a little bit of evil in terms of the usefulness of the web.

I was looking on technorati for anything new under blog posts about “web design”. I saw what looked like a potentially interesting post. I clicked through and read the post. Not awesome stuff but a solidly constructed well written post on how you sometimes do need to *cough* spend *cough* some money in order to achieve certain goals with a website.

Having liked the post I clicked to the homepage to see whether the same standard was upheld across the blog. First impressions were good. All posts were well themed, well written and the points that they were making made sense. I was thinking about putting the site on my blogroll (sadly deficient at the moment :( )

Then the warning bells started. The original post had been near the top of the list in technorati i.e. recent. Why wasn’t it on the home page of the blog. I clicked back to the specific post: it was posted today. Clicked back again to the home page: all the posts were posted today! In fact, every post on the blog had been posted today.

The penny finally dropped. A quick search on Google confirmed that the articles were republished from article directories.

Now, I have no problem with people making money on the web. I also do not believe that information wants to be anthropomorphised, let alone free. I am quite happy with the intermingling of free and toll roads on the information superhighway. It works for many countries, why shouldn’t it work on the internet?

However, I am not just a creator of websites but a consumer of websites as well. As such I do not think that there is any advantage in republishing articles. En mass as a substantial part of a website anyway. There may be specific cases where it makes some sense. Further, I think republishing articles in such a cynical fashion decreases the utility and therefore the value of the web purely for the (potential) benefit of the website “creator”.

A common argument of those who purvey duplicate content, be it from article directories, affiliate web-feeds or any other source, is that given that visitors come across the information then clearly the site was of benefit. They are looking at it the wrong way. The question is would people come across the information without the “creator’s” site. If the answer is “yes”, or even most of the time “yes” then the site has added no value. The duplicate content is merely crowding out further unique content that does add value to the web.

Which brings me to the title of post. Yes I get there eventually. If you really think that the content you’re considering republishing is that worthy of attention then there is on the web this new-fangled invention called a hyperlink. Place one of these miraculous devices on one of your pages and users can be transported from your site direct to the original source. And not only that, it will also help the original source rise up in the relevant search engine results so that even more people can see it, whereas duplication will split potential link popularity and hence position in the SERPs. Really, given how useful it is, it is surprising that not more people know about this magical hyperlink thingy ;) .

And having got to the title of the post, now let’s, finally, get to the point – the effect that we can have – sometimes inadvertently – in the bigger picture.

As I said above, I was / \ this close to putting the site in my blogroll. Doing so would have helped this website gain more visitors. Gaining more visitors would have helped this site’s “creator” money, perhaps even the difference that made the site viable. Making the site’s “creator” more money would have encouraged them, and maybe indirectly others, to create even more such sites that would crowd out useful and unique information. For want of a nail…

So, any pages that I comment on or link to in the future will need to have a search done on the content to ensure that it is unique. No doubt over time I will think of other things I can do as a website and blog owner that will positively, rather than negatively, affect the big picture. At that point “protecting the eco-system” will no doubt become another website to do for the main site.

For now, I make this post a.s.a.p. in the hopes that it will remind others to consider the larger picture in what they do.

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