A Google Webmaster Help thread has a fun conversation and discussion around the word "original."
With all that is going on with the Panda rollout, Google advising removing unoriginal content from the site. But what is original?
Check out Sasch's rant on the word:
Maybe it's just me, but it's beginning to look as though the word ORIGINAL is taking on a rather malleable, even fluid, definition.Seems like these days Chewed, Swallowed and Regurgitated or Mashed and Rehashed are perfectly acceptable synonyms for the word ORIGINAL. Plagiarism and Paraphrasing have become such a constant part of our daily web-lives that they've gradually adopted a camouflaged visage which tries to mimic the appearance of ORIGINAL as closely as humanly possible.
And yet, despite doing their best to appear ORIGINAL, these practices always have, and always will be nothing but cheap imitations of the ORIGINAL, which is something the webmasters of this world seem to have forgotten over the last decade.
You see? When I need to write about something in the real world, I drive or fly up to it, take a bunch of photos, examine it, make notes (these days I take voice-notes on my Nexus), and then I go home, process everything and write about it... On the Tech/Google front, I put in hours of analysis and research before writing any given piece, which invariably turns out to reflect my own findings.
Oh, he goes on and then the thread takes off. Heck, even Googler JohnMu gets into it by saying "this is quite an original thread!"
Have some fun, join the conversation.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
