After years of software, web development and online marketing several months ago I started the journey to become an author, of articles at least. Since the late 90’s I have written content for web pages but never published content in article form. 38 articles later on StreetArticles, with others published elsewhere, I am well on my way.

My long term goal like many writing articles is to generate traffic to websites which will build an income. But first I needed to see if I could write and then keep on writing. So far so good. Of course there are articles which could be better and there are some which I am pleased with and also recognised by others. Many of my articles so far do not include links. It has been more important to write and see if anyone was interested and hopefully keep them interested.

Now my focus is changing. More time is spent looking at social network sites and getting to grips with linking to and from articles. Due to my technical background I know how to study traffic, links and what search engines like Google, Bing and others are doing. As time passes I should be able to identify trends and useful things to do. For example, does “pinning” the image used on an article on the site PInterest make a difference. It should as it links back to the article, but it will not happen overnight. Expect articles on what I do or do not discover in the future.

I have been catching up with Google or Google+ to be precise and more specifically the Google author settings. I recommend anyone writing articles makes sure they have a Google+ account and you specify that you are an author. The purpose is Google should be able to identify your work wherever it is published. When it appears in Google search results it will show your photo and link to you as well as the article. This is very important for the future. Google and other search engines will be confident that the work is original and has value to others. That should mean better ranking and other spin off benefits.

This brings me to Mitchel Stanvich and my StreetArticles article "Is it just me or has Spain lost the plot" I have a Google+ Id and I am setup as an author so I thought I would give it a try. I searched Google for my article using the title and there it was top of the search results. “Yippee!” Followed by “wait a minute, that is not the StreetArticles site”. I clicked on the link and there it was, my article reproduced entirely word for word including my photo, posted by “Mitchel Stanvich”. No reference to me or StreetArticles. Needless to say I do not know this person, have had no contact, this is complete copyright theft.

There are many ways to deal with copyright abuse and fifteen years of software publishing and protecting copyright will come in useful. However, the problem does raise a major issue with StreetArticles.

I published the article on StreetArticles, the site has lots of traffic a very good TrustRank rating and good PageRank. Yet, someone else can republish my article in their name and “it” is the one that Google uses for its search results. Something is wrong somewhere. There are implications here which need to be considered. Articles must be published on sites that “feed” search engines correctly. I do not doubt that StreetArticles use good technology and good practise but something is wrong. How can someone steal work, republish it and rank higher? Anyone, any ideas?