Steal This Blog! SEO 2.0 Goes Creative Commons

*

Over the years I admired the Creative Commons movement. I have not only been a big fan of it.

I also used a lot of Creative Commons licensed images here on my blog as metaphorical illustrations of my articles.

I always wanted to share my knowledge on blogging, social media and search engine optimization under a Creative Commons license as well but I couldn’t.

Why? Google doesn’t allow you to duplicate your content. In case you do publish the same content on more than one URL you get penalized.

Only one instance of it will rank if you’re lucky. I had to comply with Google’s selfish and arbitrary guidelines.

The Google penalty

One day Google decided to penalize me anyway. During one of the numerous so called Panda updates they decided that my blog is low quality.

Google stopped sending me traffic for most of the relevant search queries I was ranking before.

From then one mostly worthless or downright harmful traffic has been coming via Google. Predominantly people wanting to use my images on their sites were arriving by way of Google search.

Google-free blogging

I decided to quit Google then and banned it altogether on my blog. You probably know that by now.

Then I was free to do whatever I wanted on my blog again and nobody could forbid me to spread my articles all over the Web.

I have disappeared from Google results after banning Google search and I didn’t want to go back.

Still I wanted to spread my know-how and share my insights with as big an audience as possible. Thus going Creative Commons was the logical path to me. From then on you could

legally copy and distribute my articles in their entirety.

Reproducing your articles is the best way to preserve them for the future.

• your blog can get hacked
• your database backup may fail
• you may give up blogging altogether

Yes, you may decide that the hosting costs and hours spend on blogging are not worth it and all of your work vanishes in an instant from the Web. It happens all the time.

Any person who ever has checked their broken links will notice how many blogs disappear for manifold reasons.

Even WordPress security professionals get hacked in retaliation by malicious hackers. This has happened to a blog of mine too.

The actual license

I decided to use the

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

license. It means that you can

• copy
• share
• redistribute

my blog articles on your blog, site or publication but without changing them. Some scrapers for example remove my links and instead link to themselves.

Please copy every article in its entirety including the images.

I don’t want people to think I have written a version that has been changed afterwards. In case you want to use parts of postings or remix them please contact me.

In preparation for my SEO 2.0 I changed my Creative commons license to a non-commercial one.

Why? I will republish the SEO 2.0 ebook here chapter by chapter. I don’t want people to resell my free ebook.

Spread my ebook for free as well but don’s ask readers for any kind of reimbursement, be it

• money
• personal data
• social shares

Keep it free as in free beer and freedom as well.

Credit the source

Please provide a link to the source – that is the specific article you have taken – in the following way:

Steal This Blog! SEO 2.0 Goes Creative Commons is a Creative Commons licensed article by Tad Chef of SEO 2.0

The actual headline gets linked ideally. You can show the license below the actual text but of course I would be delighted to see it above.

Do you have used my work? Please show me where! I may even add the links to the copy in the original articles so that my readers can reach a mirror in case my site is not available.

* (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Yamashita Yohei

Merken

Merken