Does Google Support Content Theft?

Everyone seems to hate Google these days. But for different reasons. Aaron Wall says they are in cahoots with the content thieves.

We all know Google isn’t perfect. That’s no question. But is it evil? I think it depends on how you define evil. Content theft is a serious issue, but is Google the problem?

Before we make Google the problem let’s consider that much of the search engine does is based on its algorithm. (This is what determines the positioning of a web page…good to know for your long term search engine optimization efforts:o)

An algorithm is a robot, a machine (or represents the machine). And machines are by nature amoral, not immoral. Amoral. That puts them in neutral territory. But that doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility for condoning content theft - if indeed they do.

The issue involves your robots.txt. If you tell Google not to crawl your content and someone else has scraped it, that isn’t Google’s fault. Google can’t tell that your content is original if it appears on another website while your robots.txt told Google not to crawl your content on your own site. Remember, it’s a machine. It doesn’t think. It just does what it’s told. But Google should still seek a solution for dealing with the content thieves. Perhaps somewhere outside its algorithm!