2. Chilling Effect of Web Content Copyright Violation Paranoia

Some extremely paranoid website owners have stopped publishing new content--a guaranteed Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.

3. Wasted Energy and Resources

In short, paranoia over web content theft distracts crucial energy from creative process of building a website. Every moment you spend wringing your hands over web content theft is a moment you aren't spending building your site.

4. Mostly Fueled by Ignorance of Real Internet Copyright Situation

Much of anxiety around internet copyright violations is caused by three groundless myths about dire consequences for your website if you are a victim:

a. internet copyright violations are hard to pursue (thanks to search engines, copyright violations are easier to identify and punish than in print);

b. your site will suffer a duplicate content penalty in search engines;

c. content theft will completely destroy unique value of your website.

To realize how groundless last two fears are, you only have to look at any newspaper website, stuffed with syndicated content from newswires.

In short, though website content theft and other internet copyright violations corrode ties that bind web together, they must not distract from real business of web: sharing information, ideas, and art. Keep publishing new content. If you don't, web content thieves have won.

JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do. Keyword optimization. Except for two pages, keyword optimization was conspicuous by its absence. In more than half web pages, keyword did not appear more than three times, meaning a very low density. Many of pages did not contain keyword at all. That may just demonstrate power of anchor text in inbound links. It also may demonstrate that Google takes a site's entire content into account when categorizing it and deciding what page to display.

Sub-headings. On most pages, sub-headings were either absent or in form of images rather than text. That's a very bad design practice, and particularly cruel to blind users. But again, Google is more forgiving.

Links: Most of web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money.

Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually majority of page. Recommendations

Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit "back" button when confronted with unpalatable text, so increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.

If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.

Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for right to publish content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.