Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

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Warning on copying news content

A major legal row could be brewing over the use of grabbing free news content to build links, as a means of search engine optimization.

A number of companies offer a service that involves crawling newspaper websites grabbing all content that isn't behind a paywall.

They then create an index, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, before categorising the content and creating alert services to meet the demands of their clients.

Once the index is created, links are sent to their clients. These may be headlines, snippets or the full article text. In the most extreme cases they even host the content themselves and then charge for said service.

Understandably, newspaper owners are not taking this lying down and one of the biggest, NewsCorp, has already approached several companies asking them to stop the practice or share some of the profits.

Although the issue has not reached UK or US courts yet, this may only be a matter of time. At the end of the day this is not about linking, it is about companies profiting by copying content not owned or written by them and not sharing a penny of that revenue with the creator.

At the very least, this is contrary to a newspaper's widely published terms and conditions but could also be a clear case of copyright infringement.

It could also, with issues relating to duplicate content, and the original site content being removed from a search engines index, be a case for a claim of loss of earnings as a result of reduced page impression, and therefore advertising revenues.

A subject which may well come up in tomorrows Duplicate Content session at SES London.

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