3 ms·

Why wouldn't everyone add that flag then?

• mquander 16y ago
  Mike makes it clear why he thinks everyone wouldn't add the flag: If Google comes across a large website that has a tonne of "original source" content which lots of other sites are claiming "original source" for, then they can automatically identify it as a scraper site and penalise/flag for manual checking. (I disagree with him that this would work, but that's clearly his line of reasoning. The most obvious failure mode is if a site mirrors all of SO's content, but nothing else, and puts the flag on it, in which case the flag doesn't help you distinguish which site is the source.)
• mike-cardwell 16y ago
  50 blogs all write original content, and all put "original source" attributes on their content. 1 website comes along and copies all of the content from these 50 websites. Google knows where the original content came from and can rank accordingly. Now, that site which copied the original source content notices dropping down the list so lies and states that they are the original source instead. Google can automatically detect that they are doing this because they have lots of data that exists on lots of other sites which has conflicting "original source" data. Google now de-lists the scraper site, or penalises further. Also, it becomes impossible for scraper sites to say that what they're doing is ok, and is good for users, if all of a sudden they're publishing lies that they are the original source for content which they're not.