 When you visit your favorite blog, do you know whether or not the articles written are from the blogger themselves or from somewhere else? Sometimes it's easy to tell, sometimes credit is given, but sometimes it's not so clear. Getting enough content for your blog can be more tough than it looks. It becomes more and more appealing to many bloggers who want traffic to use one of many free article websites from which to grab content in the form of “free articles”. Problem is, often times these “free articles” are nothing more than an advertisement for some website or product. There are literally hundreds of sources where people can grab content from their site. There are few, however, that can be had so easily and made to look like the blogger's own work. Unfortunately, given the world we live in, you have to be careful these days that every article you read is not trying to get you to shop at an online pharmacy or use a particular cell phone.
Legally, there's no difference between these articles and any other. Morally, it may create a conflict. Just like the recent discovery by the New York Times that many of the media's military analysts had jobs or backgrounds that were a complete conflict of interest for them, it's always a conflict of interest when something has a motive which is not what it seems. Spotting these articles is usually easier at the end of the article. The company or person pushing the product or service is usually more apt to place themselves at the end to make it look more inconspicuous, though some may do it right in the beginning, for example an article called “How to save on gas this summer” may say something like “Did you know that using http://www.somewebsitethatsavesyouongas.com will help you save money on gas by x, y and z?” These articles, though sometimes honestly trying to tell you about a useful service or a good site review, are usually nothing more than someone trying to push the site either because they own it or are an affiliate. Affiliates are people who make money from someone else's site getting traffic or selling something via their links. Many of these articles are in areas where spam through email has become so saturated they look for other ways to sell you something, especially in industries such as online pharmacies, auto insurance and investing/loans. If you search google.com's web search for “free articles” you will return thousands of results for sites like articlesbase.com and articlecity.com. These sites are there for writers to post their articles so that websites can grab them up and use them under certain conditions. Some of the articles are excellent, well written and non-biased in nature. They are written by journalism students or writers who want to submit articles and increase their portfolio. Many, however, are nothing more than clever and not-so-clever ads. The next time you read an article on a site that seems like it may be selling you something, and you think the article may be a reproduction of something somewhere else, copy a phrase from it that seems uniquely worded (for example, in this article you could use “tremendous tortoise tortures tumblers”) and see how many results you get for the exact phrase from a google.com web search. If it turns up on many other sites and is obviously not written by the blogger, perhaps you should write to them and let them know that if they are going to use other peoples' content, they should try to make it objective in nature and not a slick sales pitch.
Recommend this article...
|
