When I started Webologist in 2006 I was completely new to the internet, and very naive about how it all worked. Like most people, I made many mistakes, but slowly, as I learnt more, I went back and corrected them, often removing entire articles etc. But some errors of judgement are still lurking around.
In one of the first versions of Webologist, I took advantage of the many free articles that were available. I thought that I had discovered an easy way to build a website. ‘Why hadn’t anyone else done this before?’ I thought to myself – none of the guides said you could just go and find 50 articles and paste them into Blogger and publish – they were obviously keeping it secret! You see, I really was naive. In time all of these free article pages were dropped from the search engines. It was only after asking why on an SEO forum that I realised that my site had no value. In fact, this was probably how I was introduced to SEO.
My next approach for Webologist was the blogging one. Good, if done properly, but again I made mistakes. Sometimes I would copy too much, and without attribution or reference. In time I tidied these up too.
In the next version of Webologist, I was just using it to keep track of my efforts at setting up a server. It was in limbo for a while, and posts were infrequent. However, I held up my hands, admitted that I was really a newcomer, and just turned it into a personal blog. What was left on the site was all my own work. Or that is what I thought.
Yesterday I received a comment on an article that I had copied another, and that this site was SPAM, and it had been reported to the search engines. At first I thought nothing of it, as this is the type of underhand tactic that many people online resort to to try to get a competitive advantage in the search engines – directly attack the competition and hope that you make some ground. But I took a closer look, and yes, my article was the same, or at least the body was. The introduction and conclusion were different. I checked the publishing dates and my article was published about 6 months later, so it seemed resonable to assume that I had copied a large chunk of another article and just changed the intro and conclusion. It did cross my mind that maybe I had been duped, and that the other site just adjusted the publishing date, something easy to do on a blog. But something told me that it was not my writing style and I had to admit to myself that an earlier mistake had come back to haunt me.
I promptly deleted the offending article, and sent a message to the chap that had pointed our my error, and apologised.
But that is not all. At some point in the past year, I started using the article sharing sites to publish my own articles. I must have been so convinced that the article was mine, that I shared it on GoArticles.com! I have deleted this entry too. So hopefully I have now cleared up this error from the past now….. but I still have this doubt in my mind. Maybe I did write the article? Maybe I have fallen into a trap? How will I ever know? The only consolation is that the article was not popular anyway, which may be an indication that another site had the authority for it first. We live and learn. I just hope that there are not too many other issues like this waiting to raise their ugly heads. Maybe in future I shall keep a log of all articles written. But then, isn’t that what a blog is anyway?
