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Ethical & Unethical Blogging – Where Do You Fall?

December 5, 2012 By 7 Comments
unethical blogging

Image by ‘Haberdashery Pie’

Lots of people have taken up blogging in recent years. Some people write blogs to educate and make money, whilst other people blog as a hobby. Irrespective of your blogging reasons, it is crucial to provide factual information when publishing content.  This is where ethical & unethical blogging come in to effect.

Misrepresenting information and hoping readers to remain indifferent to the information presented can be seen to be unethical. Also, such acts can be seen to mislead the community of people reading your post. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that the facts and information presented on your blog are true!

Ethical & Unethical Blogging

Why Bloggers Make False Claims?

Before I make any statement, I would emphasize the fact that (hopefully) no blogger would deliberately try to misinform their readers.

One reason why bloggers may make false claims is to do with time.  Checking facts can take a lot of time to research properly, time that is always against bloggers. Bloggers are desperate to attract traffic to their site, therefore, investing time to research posts can be seen (to some) out of the question as that time could better be spent writing more posts.

A great article is created and fleshed out to few hundred words with some “facts” or “information” that may not necessarily be true. The blogger perceives that both search engines and readers will find it sufficient. But in reality, maybe it is sufficient for search engines but what about readers?

Examples Of Unethical Blogging

Now, of course not everyone does unethical blogging, in fact the vast majority of bloggers are very good!  That said, I felt that I should give some examples of unethical blogging that some people use.

Last week I guest posted on a high traffic site within the SEO niche. (I don’t wish to link to any articles and belittle the author showing their ignorance, I am just trying to make a point.) A certain post of theirs discussed a few ways of traffic generation. The ideas mentioned were excellent but one of the ideas was completely outdated and misinformed. To give you a clue, the post in question talked about article directories. Now, we all know how the article farms (directories) suffered as a result of the Panda and Penguin update. The most interesting point was that some people approved of and said that they were going to use this particular outdated idea via the comments section.  The blind ruling the blind I guess!

Here is another example of unethical blogging that is unfortunately quite common. Around the time that Google launched its EMD (Exact Match Domain) update, a couple of days later, an article was published in SEOmoz showing how EMD affected some of the sites that the author ran. The post was well researched and had images from their own database. After a week or so, I was searching for sites to guest post on. Being an SEO enthusiast, I was searching for sites within that niche. I stumbled upon a site and was astonished to see a rewritten post of the one published in SEOmoz. I should, however, admit that the post was well rewritten, but I was annoyed that the author took all the credit!  There are many examples of articles being copied (rewritten or not) from sites without any credit being given.

These are just two examples of unethical blogging. There are many more but I think these two will suffice to prove my point. There are several disadvantages of such tactics and I will let you figure it out for yourself. I would like to focus on the solution, rather than the problem itself.

How To Make A Well Researched Post?

Communication Skills

Image by ‘cogitosergiosum’

Researching for a topic is simple. Generally, there are two options you can do. You can either;

  1. Practically implement strategies and see what works.
  2. Theoretically arrive at an opinion and present it as your research.

Considering the practical implementation, it is the best way of researching. This is because these types of posts immediately establish the writer as the authority as they show proof of what works/what doesn’t work on their site. For this strategy to work, you really need to be passionate about the subject you are writing about. This is why new bloggers are suggested to focus on a niche that they are passionate about.

The other way of theoretical research is easy and time friendly. You just have to consume information through various sources and arrive at your own decision through supporting facts. Most bloggers fall within this category of research (even I do it). However, many fail to provide credit and links to supporting facts when appropriate. You could argue that some may think that this presentation of supporting facts will dethrone their authority. Another reason may be that they do not wish their PR juice to be distributed. If you are a PR fan then I will tell you the truth “PR is just another element for ranking out of hundreds”. (Hey! You can always use nofollow links)

Linking to supporting facts or original source is vital. These are the practices that will establish you as an authority and increase reader’s trust. Not giving credit and proving yourself as the ultimate authority by taking other’s credit is just a lame way of blogging and can be seen as unethical blogging!

The internet has shrunk the whole globe. It is much easier for readers to find out the real source (as I did). If you steal other people’s ideas or content, do not be surprised to have your own work stolen as well. The same holds true the other way around – “As you sow, so you reap!”

What other unethical blogging practices have you noticed?  Have you been victim to someone stealing your content and trying to pass it off as your own?  Let us know your views and opinions by leaving a comment below!

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Thank you to my Guest Post Author: John

John works as an Editor at eyeforweb.com. He has been working with the firm for the past two years. EyeForWeb (which is run by expert WordPress developers) is dedicated to provide excellent designing and SEO service.
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  • Andi the minion

    Interesting post, however, I think I might have to disagree with a couple of things, but they say debate is good. Firstly, two people with a lot of knowledge and understanding of a topic having very similar experiences can both write articles that could look very close indeed. With billions of people on the planet, the chances of more than one person writing articles so similar that you think it was a rewritten post is very high.

    Ask two foot soldiers in different parts Afghanistan to write down their typical day and you might find it hard to tell they were two different people.

    Now I don’t know what these two articles you referred to looked like or read either of them, it is possible one was crafted from the other however I do think it is wrong to assume that one article is a copy of another, with millions of blogs on the web covering the same things, there will be people publishing articles on the same topic in the same week. It happens, what is it they say about Monkeys and Shakespeare? And that is just Monkeys!

    As for article directories, well, there have been a few fascinating articles recently that are now saying article marketing should still be used even after the updates as long as you publish a new quality article to each site. Google still love quality articles and even if the link juice is weak, they are still ethical links.

    Any duplicate content issue means that your site will be fine as the article is not on your site and Google will take into account the quality of all of the other content on each site that has your article on it and they will rank each site accordingly. They won’t destroy the sites and as it isn’t your site, it isn’t your issue.

    I for one have been toying with idea of re starting an article marketing campaign, I no longer fear Google and I intend to deliver quality articles that Google expect. Articles are still ranking high in Google from sites like eZine Articles due to the quality of the writing.

    As all things, article marketing was abused with weak inferior articles designed simply to get loads of links.With so many people no longer scarping articles from directories willy nilly means your articles will now be seen and read by real people and each article is nothing more than an extra billboard pointing people to your site.

    Forget about the actual link and focus on the exposure of your content and name. With the updates causing directories to change the way they work and with less people using them, quality articles will become the priority on these sites and it probably won’t be long before their articles will start to rise up the ranks.

    However, I could be wrong :-)

    • http://onlineincometeacher.com/ Matt Smith

      Hi Andi! Debate is good in my book, which is one of the reasons I thought this was a great post to publish. :)

      I kind of agree with you here. Just because two articles are similar, doesn’t necessarily mean that one is copied from another. Like you say, bloggers tend to deal with the same subjects, so it’s only natural that you will cover similar subjects.

      Having said that, I have been the victim of having content from this site being published on other people’s sites and passed off as their own. This just makes me angry, especially when they haven’t even bothered to edit it, just blatantly copied and pasted it. Even a link back to the original would have been nice, but I have lost count of the times I have had to get in touch with WordPress.com or a hosting company to let them know of a site that is breaching copyright. Luckily, I have been successful in getting many of these breaches removed, but it still a hassle.

      I suppose these are the two extremes of the issue. Most of the time, it can be seen to fall somewhere in the middle, which raises the question – is it ethical or unethical? Personally, I think that you can spot a fake a mile off.

      As for article directories, I do think that they can be used effectively IF done right. Unfortunately, the vast majority abused the system which caused Google to introduce the changes. Like you say, if you post quality unique articles, you have nothing to worry about.

      Personally, I still stay away from them myself. I find that there are much more effective ways to build backlinks that directories these days.

      • Andi the Minion

        Hi Matt, yes blatant copy and pasting is theft, very unethical, I myself have had a guest post I wrote for Zac Johnson swiped and put on another site, he took action, which reminds me I should go and see if it was removed.

        That is unacceptable practice, and it is people like that do that stuff that force Google to take drastic action and ruins it for the rest of the web. :-(

        As for article directories, I can write a 1000 word post in an hour maybe less which can be good quality yet may not be used on our site or as a guest post so I am thinking of adding a few to directories instead of sitting on my hard drive, maybe even write one or two specifically for the job. They can go live quicker than most guest posts which as you say is far more effective though.

        • http://onlineincometeacher.com/ Matt Smith

          I’d not thought about the speed of publishing, you make a good point there! Guest posting is great, but it can take a while for a post to get published. At least directories can publish your work, more or less instantly.

  • Hafiz

    I really enjoy reading this post.. Thumbs up to you, by the way you write, I can really see your passion in these SEO stuffs (which is very difficult for me).. There is one question I would like to ask, how to keep those passions burning. Mine starts to cool down day by day, especially when I have lots of assignments need to be done.

    • http://onlineincometeacher.com/ Matt Smith

      Good question! There are plenty of days where I just get sick of writing about the same things and just want to go off and do something else.

      That said, I do really enjoy working for myself. There is a great sense of freedom that blogging gives you, so I guess that is why I love it.

      As for loosing passion on a particular subject, this is why I always recommend to new bloggers to write about a subject that they are passionate about. It’s natural to get bored or lose interest at times, but you need that passion to start with to drive you through the tough days.

      Try to stick with it and you will feel better when you see the hard work start to pay off.

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