It’s such a cliché to blog New Year’s resolutions, and no way at all to stand out. So instead I’ll bring you a list of things that hopefully other people won’t do to you and your personal brand in the coming year and beyond.
Scraping your website and stealing your content
I remember the first time this happened to me, I thought “well, I guess this means I’m officially a professional blogger.” But no, it’s more likely a sign that your website has finally been indexed by Google, which is often how the scraper bots find blogs on any topic.
How did I know that first time? I saw a trackback coming in from a strange url and a visit to that site made it very clear who I was dealing with.
Back then in 2007, many bloggers, myself included, used to make a lot of noise about the consequences of duplicate content, and I would make a spam complaint to Google every time I discovered someone stealing my articles. Nowadays those worries have largely been put to rest – canonical urls mean Google knows who published first, and syndicating your content is a good thing – and it’s only worth reacting to scrapers if the content theft has been done in a way where efforts were made not only to remove all signs of your authorship, but to replace them with someone else’s.
Which happened to me recently.
Taking credit for your work
I was recently checking some LinkedIn weekly updates in my email when I noticed a familiar-sounding article title, so I clicked through to the website.
For her contribution to a group blog, the blogger had manually copied and pasted an entire article of mine. If that wasn’t bad enough, she had also removed all the links – which were almost entirely for crediting research sources i.e. other people – and added new links pointing at other articles in the group blog’s own archives.
She was using my work to entice people to her site and had modified my work to keep people there.
Worse- she was not only taking credit for my work, but by removing links to the sources, she was also taking credit for other people’s work!
Grrr.
So I contacted her over LinkedIn and said:
“Please remove my content from your website. It’s one thing to repost my article with permission, but you have done so without permission and with modifications as if I was promoting your website.”
Although she didn’t apologize, to her credit she did take down the article within 24 hours.
I hope this was just a rookie mistake, and that no other bloggers had their content abused by that person in the same way.
Competing with you instead of joining you
Today marks the first anniversary of this Personal Branding Blog. In the months leading up to the launch, I had begun to blog more and more about personal branding on JobMob and so when the opportunity came up to blog here, I had to decide if it was better to continue blogging in parallel or to join forces with Dan for mutual benefit. I chose the latter, and it’s worked out well for everyone involved.
Happy anniversary to the Personal Branding Blog and to all the current and past contributors, and good luck moving forward for another year.
Author:
Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.
