Mizozo's New Publishing Rules

It is actually quite difficult to think up how to present new publishing rules, much more difficult than originally thought. The difficulty lies more in presentation than intention because intention is quite clear, we intend to follow Google's guidelines for good content. However, how do you present this in such a fashion that it is clear and concise, but doesn't sound like a bulleted list of "Do not do this"?

After much thought, and more sleeping on it, it has been decided that there will only be three rules, very vaguely spelled out.

1 - Articles must be at least 50% unique.
2 - No Spam
3 - Don't break copyrights

So, what constitutes unique? If I take a paragraph composed of 3 sentences, and change some word order in each sentence, is that unique? What if I also change the order of the sentences? What if I add something to each sentence, or subtract?

Well, the short answer ... depends. It depends on much. If someone is just posting reworded content, we may decide to remove your articles, then again we may not. For now, and probably forever, this will be a value judgement. The recommendation, don't push the limits and you will never be sorry. If you want some SEO to your site, write something original on Mizozo that points to a similar story on your site, we will have no reason to remove that. However, if all you do is copy the first paragraph from your article, possibly reworded, with a link to the original article, its safe to assume that sooner or later someone may not like it and possibly remove all your articles.

Now, whats spam?

If someone takes the common approach of  posting article after article to Mizozo on some mundane subject, this is obviously spam. If you are copying some content on numerous sites in order to increase your rank or advertise some event, while this falls under rule #1, it too is spam. But what about those SEO experts that are writing terrible unique articles with a link or two to a site? To be honest, we have come up with numerous examples of pseudo-spam, but again it all depends on the publisher. If a publisher is just writing crap after crap which is obviously spam, we may tolerate it for a while, but sooner or later someone may flag it as spam and again all the publishers articles may be deleted.

The copyright thing is nothing new at Mizozo. If we get an order to take down an article, we take it down first, then ask the publisher to defend themselves if they would like to. If we like the defense, we'll put it back up.

So, whats the lesson we can take from this? If you want to ensure your articles stay on Mizozo, write valuable articles. Google has tons of material on what they consider valuable content, so if you want more on that I suggest you check out their video collection. Otherwise, just follow the three rules above and we will all live happily ever after.