Until Further Notice

After some thought, a bit of discussion, some heated arguments, more thinking, further arguments, a bit more discussion, a bit more arguments, a few fists, some biting, more thinking, more discussion and some more serious thinking ... it has been decided that Mizozo will cease providing an article copying service for its members. This has actually been a service that wasn't advertised, so most of you were probably unaware, but anyone who was paying attention could easily see that every morning a series of articles were copied from other sites onto Mizozo with a link back to the original article.

The reason for this is simple, Google (as do most search engines) detest repeat content. We have been aware of this, and due to our lack of original articles we had previously decided to post other people's articles on Mizozo. We immediately noticed that search engines weren't indexing these articles, but people visiting our site would click on them occasionally which, again we thought, was keeping people interested in our site. Well, after repeatedly being told that this was a bad idea, we finally changed our minds.

As of today, Mizozo will cease to copy articles from other sites. Likewise, we have asked all publishers that were doing so themselves to stop. We will not force anyone to stop, we are for an open platform, but if we notice it repeatedly we will simply mark the user as SEO.

I would like to point out that before making this decision, we had done a quick brainstorming session on how to keep these articles on Mizozo so as not to negatively impact our own SEO. We don't have a final solution yet, but several options are available. We will be returning to this in the not so distant future with a better mechanism that will likely be substantially more beneficial to other site owners, slightly more beneficial to our users, and likely not beneficial at all to Mizozo as a whole but we will do it anyway.