Everybody hates thieves. I have railed against folks who steal others’ content and put them on their own sites to move up the rankings or help make their miserable websites look less miserable. But there is such a thing worse than content thieves – idea thieves.

So what do I mean by idea theft? Let me give you an example here. So I have Google Reader up and running to keep myself informed about the latest developments in the world. I follow a lot of gurus to learn from their perspectives and find out about hot topics in my niche. I was reading a guru’s blog posts the other day, and all of the sudden I got the feeling of Deja Vu. I had see that post before. Could that be that I read that blog earlier and forgot about it altogether? That wasn’t it. After thinking about it for a while, I finally realized why I had that feeling. I had discussed the same idea on my blog a year earlier. The gentleman had taken my idea and copied the discussion points without even coming up with his own thoughts. In other words, he had hijacked my ideas and presented them as his own. Sort of like me reading a novel and writing my own novel with the same characters and pretty much the same story.

Unfortunately, this practice has been going on the WWW for a long time now. These so-called superstars are often to arrogant to care about the ramifications of their actions. They hijack ideas, sandwich them with their comments, and present it as their very own posts. Not everyone does that, and I personally have no problem someone taking my idea and giving me credit. But if you take my idea and present it as your own, that’s plagiarism.

Google and other search engines currently don’t have a way to penalize sites that plagiarize one way or the other. You can always report content but I am not sure how Google deals with this issue. As more content is generated online, I believe search engines should take time to address this issue. It’s good to have unique content (unique words). But you should always give credit if you get your idea from someone else. Duplicating ideas is worse than duplicating content in my book.

What do you think?

We have all heard it before. Content is king. In fact, anyone who wants to sound smart would say that. It’s politically correct and somewhat correct in real life. If you ask people what does it mean when they say that, they are probably going to tell you: good, solid content which is unique to your site and provides value is King. I would actually argue against that. The World Wide Web is full of websites that have valuable content on them, but they still fail to make it to the top of the SERPs or get any solid stream of traffic going.

Content that provides value to your users is pawn not king. If you look at successful websites, they not only have great content, they have great promotion behind it. And they also happen to have a personality, a take people are interested to see. Having unique content on your site doesn’t mean having content that is not stolen from article directories. You’ve got to have a unique take. You’ve got to inspire people with your writing. SEO is only part of the game. You can optimize title tags, meta tags, and so on, but unless your content is link-worthy, you are not going to have too much success with the search engines.

What makes your content link-worthy? It’s not just providing value but how you go about doing it. Let me give you an example here. I am sure you’ve all been to those classes where you have a super smart professor who knows everything about everything but can’t properly communicate his knowledge with his students. The same thing applies to your content. You’ve got to connect with people. You can have extremely valuable content that bores people to death or something that people are willing to die to consume. Content is not king! Your personality and how you go about providing value is what makes your content king.

Stealing content is very much different from stealing money from a bank. It’s very similar to stealing music through P2P network. For some reason, folks who steal music don’t find it appalling or even wrong. They feel if the music is out there, you can take it. But would you steal a car if its parked in your street with its doors wide open? The same can be said about all the content available on the Internet. Creating content takes time and effort. The Internet superstars go through several phases and lots of hard work to create top notch content. And they make it available to the public for free or a small fee. But just because the content is there, it doesn’t mean you can copy it.

Many folks don’t even understand the concept of stealing content. If the content doesn’t belong to you, and you copy it and change it a little bit, you are stealing. Even if you change it dramatically, you are still stealing. You should always try to come up with your own content. Stealing ideas is not wrong. In fact, most experts agree that stealing ideas can bring up further discussions and lead to more value for the readers. But if you are stealing the content and not just the idea, then you are really robbing the bank. You are just not realizing it.

In recent months, I have become really disillusioned by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines out there for their inability to show useful content at the top. The good thing about having SEO professionals at hand is that you can get your good content to rank higher on major search engines. The bad thing is that you can use these guys to get your crappy content to the top. Think about it. You have taken time to write a piece about history of research and the best researchers in the world, and a guy gets ranked higher than you by writing crappy content that is optimized for the engines.

I am willing to concede that it’s very difficult to get ranked for general terms such as “research” but it’s not impossible, and I have seen way too many low quality sites ranked on various engines in the past few months. I have no doubt that search engines are trying their best to bring the best quality content to the front, but at the end of the day, any algorithm can be gamed.

A year ago, I talked about how getting searchers involved can help Google improve the quality of its SERPs. Google has finally taken steps towards adding the human factor to its ranking factors. I firmly believe that involving searchers is one way forward. Will there folks who will try create automated systems to manipulate the results? I am sure there will be, but content will be king again in the next few years. Only this time, it will be good content reigning supreme and not the crappy content we have all come to see in the past few years.