Google: No We Are Not Stealing Your Content & Citing Google As The Author

Apr 28, 2022 - 7:31 am 4 by
Filed Under Google

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The other day Gianluca Fiorelli posted on Twitter that he felt Google was taking content from third party sites and placing that content on in the Google Search knowledge panels but sourcing itself, Google, as the author of that content and not the site it is sourcing it from. Well, Google said that is not true, that it is the other way around.

Google said that the content was written by Google employees and the sites you thought wrote it originally actually stole it from Google and put it on their own sites. I did dig into some examples and noticed that many actually didn't have that content on their site until recently, a few months ago, whereas Google likely had that content there for years. It is very hard to prove either way, but we know Google has been writing its own knowledge panels since 2018 - so it is more likely that these sites stole the content from Google - word for word - than Google stealing the content from those third party sites and not citing them.

Here are the allegations from Gianluca Fiorelli posted on Twitter:

There is a bit of a gap in the middle but click on the first tweet to scan them all.

Then Danny Sullivan of Google replies:

He then goes further the next day:

Even before Danny replied to any of this, Glenn Gabe also felt that Google was being copied from, not the other way around:

Brodie Clark as well:

In any event, this is why we have the Wayback Machine - the only issue is it is super hard to know when Google posted these in the search results. So you can believe whomever you want - I do trust Danny Sullivan, he would 100% not lie to me, despite what you all think. Google links out to sources all the time, most of the time, so I don't see why Google would steal the content versus link to the source of the content. But maybe I am naive?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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