Before we get too far into the decisions we have made with BloggingZoom, we would like to sincerely thank everyone who offered a lot of really good insights about the copy/paste rule here at BZ. Some issues were brought up that we hadn’t considered before, and that really helped us to make good, informed decisions that will positively affect the future success of the site.

Since we plan on continuing to ask for advice and insight from the community, we would like to officially invite you to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed. You can subscribe in a reader using that link, or you can subscribe by email by using the form at the top of the right sidebar. That way you will be able to be a part of any future discussions about the future of BloggingZoom and can stay up to date as we help you to learn how to use BZ more effectively.

Two Rules Discussed By The Community

For those that missed the discussion, we talked about two BloggingZoom rules:

1. The rule that didn’t allow users to copy and paste their submissions.
2. The rule that requires users to use a 350+ character description for their submissions.

Here are some of the stand-out points from the discussion:

• I don’t mind the no copy/paste rule, but I do think it lowers the number of submissions that BZ receives. I think most users will be willing to take the time to do an original writeup for their own content, but less people will be willing to take the time to submit the content of others. - Steven Snell
• The basic problem is that the majority of the people who are submitting to BZ don’t understand organic traffic and how power it can be. - Frank C
• Allowing people to copy/paste will NOT hurt everyone - it will only hurt the people that do it. No matter what we decide it will not affect you at all, unless you get lazy and start copying and pasting. - Court
• After that the copy-paste rule started being enforced rudely and my submissions dropped. Coming up with 350 original characters for submission of a new post to a social voting site is just not feasible. In my opinion this copy-paste rule will make bloggers harder than they want to, frankly, bloggers should not have to work that hard. - Shamim
• I like the 350 unique content rule. Do I understand that it can be a pain in the ass? Sure do. Some of my sites I’m not so worried about organic traffic or SEO from a standpoint that I am going to lose money. - Elliott
• Thanks for that, and if you are certain that a duplicate content penalty wouldn’t affect my submissions, or the entire BZ site for that matter, then I would tend to believe that each person should have the right to decide for themselves what they want to do. - Elliott
• Even if I understand the rule, I would prefer to be optional. Some of you are more able than me to write 350 characters. I must still translate it into English. Sometimes, my post is not big or I feel lazy thus don’t bother to submit it. Most of my traffic is from Google and BZ represent a few % only. But I will take it. - Steve McGrath
• I would make it optional, while stating clearly on the submit page what the advantages/disadvantages are. Another step that might help is putting a character counter in the box. That, at the very least, would make it easier for the ones that are trying but are frustrated with the rule. - Jeremy Hobbs

Copy And Paste Rule Change

From now on, we are going to allow people to copy and paste their descriptions. We don’t recommend doing this because it will remove most of the ability of your submission to get ranked. We’re comfortable allowing this to happen because it will not affect any of the submissions that have unique descriptions. Submissions that use a description that’s unique will have just as much ability to get ranked as they had before this change.

How Duplicate Content Penalties Work

In order to help everyone to understand exactly why we had the rule in the first place, we wanted to go over duplicate content and how it works. Please use the comments if you have any questions!

Google has a filter that checks content to see if it’s unique, or if has been published in other places online. If the content has been published on another website, Google has to try to determine which website was the original author of the content.

For example, let’s say that you created a post on your blog. Now this post was written by you, and was 100% original. Now let’s say that you take your post and submit that post to BloggingZoom. You copy and paste the first two paragraphs of the post, using it as your description. Google will eventually find both your blog post, and the submission page at BloggingZoom - those two different pages will both have some of the same content. This is called duplicate content, it’s content that is published in more than one place.

Now Google is going to try to determine who is the original author of the content. In theory, they should be able to know that your blog post is the original and that the BZ submission isn’t. In this case, your post will rank exactly how it normally would and the BZ page wouldn’t rank very well because of a duplicate content penalty. This duplicate content penalty will only affect that one page - these filters do not affect an entire site unless every single page of the site is duplicate content.

Even if Google is able to determine that your site is the original author of the content, this filter will still hurt most of you. Why? In most cases, BloggingZoom is able to get your content ranked in a better location than your site would be able to. We see time after time where a BloggingZoom submission is able to achieve a top 5 ranking in Google when the original post is clear back on page 10 or so. This gives you the chance at some really good traffic. A person comes to your submission in BloggingZoom, where they are invited to go check out the original post. If your BZ submission gets filtered because you copied and pasted the description, your post will still be on page 10 and your BZ submission will be on page 50 or so. Instead of getting the bridged traffic through BloggingZoom, you won’t get any traffic at all.

Why We Changed The Rule

Even though the rule was there to protect the best interests of the BloggingZoom users, there’s no doubt that it has been holding back the service. New people to BloggingZoom don’t understand the rule, and we have realized that this will continue to be an issue that plagues BZ.

Although the traffic that can be reached through search engines will continue to be a huge benefit of using our service, we also are positioning ourselves as a site that can deliver large amounts of burst traffic. This relies on our ability to find and convert new people to the service.

The speed at which the service is growing is making it more and more difficult to educate new users on the ins and outs of BloggingZoom. This means that new users will continue to be frustrated with rules that they consider to be a hassle. Allowing people to make their own decision on this issue will allow us to grow the user base of BloggingZoom without hurting anyone that already uses the service. Those educated in getting maximum benefit from the service will still be able to get the search engine traffic they could get before, in fact that benefit will grow as we get more users and a stronger site.

During this process, we have realized that we haven’t been delivering the education that people need to get the most out of BZ and we are dedicated to making a change.

350 Character Rule

Since we are going to allow people to copy/paste if they feel like it’s really what they want to do, we don’t see any reason to lower the 350 character rule. This will give them a shot at still getting ranked if there are enough comments on their submission.

Many people have asked whether we can add a counter to the submission box that allows them to know how many characters they have used. We have this feature in development and will be integrating it very shortly with quite a few other significant changes.

People On Both Sides Of The Issue

We were quite surprised to find that there are people on both sides of the copy/paste issue. A good percentage of the people that participated in the discussion wanted to keep the rule as it was, mostly because they were afraid that allowing people to copy descriptions would affect their submissions. As soon as it was explained that this doesn’t hurt the unique descriptions, most people said that the most natural decision would be to make it optional, educating people on why they should be using descriptions that aren’t copied and pasted.

We sincerely appreciate all of the opinions that were given, no matter which side of the issue they were on. We honestly learned a lot during this process and can see that BZ will be a much better service because of the decision that was made. We will be that much closer to delivering the burst traffic without taking away from the search capability we already have.

Please feel free to use the comments is you have any questions or concerns, our top priority is helping you to make the most of our service.

~ Court