Google is OK with Stealing Your Content
The relationship between Google and publishers has always been pretty clear (at least in my mind). Google will reward publishers with traffic in return for listing their content in search results so they can surround it with ads. It's a relationship filled with trust issues. Those issues have been exacerbated by various Google updates over the past 2 to 3 years.
This morning I was compiling a new presentation and was looking for some information around the "cost of an inbound marketing lead". The result I got was:
Google is taking content straight from HubSpot's blog and showing it word for word on their search page. This one stat was part of a report that was compiled from surveying over 5,000 marketers. Considerable time and effort went into producing that post and creating that stat. Yet Google feels it's OK for them to simply scrape it from the HubSpot blog and show it on their site.
This appears to be part of Google rolling out their new #GoogleNow service (thanks to @glenngabe @GregKristan @jonathandeamer for pointing this out).
I've mostly seen Google do this for Wikipedia results:
In this case HubSpot outranks Wikipedia for the search query "what is inbound marketing", yet Google reduce the positives around that by scraping the Wikipedia page and showing it on top of the organic search results.
These kind of features from Google are starting to make the penalties they dish out to webmasters pretty hypocritical. When Matt Cutts asked for examples of sites outranking other sites with scraped content, he probably didn't like the answer he got:
On one hand Google tells webmasters to focus on creating quality content and they will be rewarded for it, on the other they are scraping that content to make ad revenue from without compensating the publisher adequately for the time and effort they've invested.
Of course you can't simply block Google. A huge percentage of all publishers traffic come from Google and there in lies the problem. Google can make up the rules as they go along.
But at some point is Google is going to push too far? If GoogleNow is going to be a new service powered by other sites content, how are those sites going to be fairly compensated for that work? Historically their reward was an organic visit, but it appears Google may prefer to keep those visits for themselves in future.
Experienced Senior Sales Person | Speaker | SaaS | AI | Tech
10yFrank, this is based on the algorithm for your personal profile. I do not get the same result when I search for this same phrase.
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10yBit by bit Google is stepping up the scraping game until there is nothing left for publishers than to work for free for Google.
Independent SEO Consultant for News Publishers. Co-Founder of the News & Editorial SEO Summit.
10yWould be lovely if Google used a separate bot for knowledge graph scraping, so we could block it. But that seems exceptionally unlikely. If anything, Google will be merging different bots and indices (as I recently speculated about on State of Digital with regards to Google News) to make opting out an all-or-nothing affair, and to make outside regulation a more difficult thing to do. Google wants everything and is increasingly giving less and less in return.
Marketing Communication
10yI think you said it best when you said that its a relationship filled with trust issues. Solutions who aim to fix, not leverage, that reality will win in the end.