Does Hitwise Read SEO Book?

Where did you find the "advanced seo" presentation? I'm assuming that was a paid product?

Go Aaron!

Someone forwarded the webinar deck to me because they were angry about Hitwise stealing our material and cleansing attribution.

That is shocking!!!

Hitwise i hope you are ashamed of yourselves!

Hi Aaron,

We regularly have to contend with this kind of casual copyright infringement for articles and reports we publish on our site, it's both irritating and time consuming.

The only adequate method I've found of dealing with it is to do as you've done here and let as many people know about it as possible. We usually find that other people's content tends to have been 'borrowed' too - so we make a point of informing them and advising they contact the infringer also. As a side benefit, we've found it to be potentially useful for building up alliances and partnerships with some site owners - and even reciprocal links also.

The DMCA warnings are worth doing, but they seem to be regarded as just a slap on the wrist now by many who engage in this activity. There's nothing like an in-box full of irate content owners threatening legal action to really focus the mind :)

I'm not sure if it's lack of life experience or wilful disregard because "it's only on a website", but this is the sort of thing that could get you hauled up in front of a judge and sued if you tried it with other media like print or TV. Some people need reminding that on-line media is subject to copyright law also.

Hi,
I was part of a webinar that Hitwise Search ran yesterday . Firstly, apologies for not sourcing and attributing the SEOBook chart that we used in the presentation.

This was an oversight and we have taken measures to prevent this from happening again. We’ve committed to re-recording the webinar with the proper attribution and other courses of action to help rectify this error with SEOBook. It’s a great site for Search professionals to refer to – very useful and enjoyable to use.

Again this should have been properly attributed and I hope that people and SEO Book accept our sincere apology and trust that we take this matter seriously and are doing everything we can to put it right.

Stuart McKeown

Airbrushing out the logo is a bit more than an "oversight" though isn't it Stuart? This is more like wilful intent to pass someone else's copyright off as your own. Can you describe what measures you have taken to prevent this happening again exactly?

I'm certainly dubious about Hitwise as a brand now having seen this and will think twice before trusting the integrity of communications originating from you. You're going to have to do better than a boilerplate "we're really sorry, it won't happen again" line to recover from this one.

I don't really listen to him, but it reminds me of an old dr. dre/eminem song:

"Wait! What if there's an explanation for this shit?"

"What? She tripped? Fell? Landed on his d...?!"

"and trust that we take this matter seriously and are doing everything we can to put it right"

Stuart, here's a tip to put things right:

Now as difficult as this may sound, it is possible.....simply this : don't carefully and painstakingly airbrush out logos.

The Hitwise apology does nothing to address the willful and deliberate action of copyright infringement. This wasn't simply a case of forgetting to correctly attribute the source. I think the apology is pathetically inadequate.

Hitwise has the email addresses of everyone that attended the webinar. They should send send an email to all attendees notifying them of the incorrect attribution, and pull the current webinar from the archives until it has been updated.

At least seobook gets some good publicity out of this:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hitwise

Plagiarizing scum. If you do that at university, you get thrown out.

Shocking @Hitwise!!

Aaron you may want to invest into a software for watermarking your images in future..

AD

Aaron

This makes me wary of any information coming from Hitwise. And the "apology" only makes me trust the company less.

A compliment and a slap, at the same time!

Please see the Future of Hitwise After Plagiarism Graph.

What a f**king joke of an apology. That was really pathetic.

When an opportunist gets caught, they say they are sorry. If they don't get caught, they are not sorry. That is one of the hallmarks of opportunism.

The only way to protect against it is 'self attack'; watermarks, legal action, in short... take away opportunity by finding your vulnerabilities first.

But hey, to have to use this strategy makes you the leader. That is a hallmark of the leadership position, so at least that feels good (for a few minutes).

These people have to be shown how to behave, or they won't. Sad. True.

Absolutely shocking...And to think this is a "proper company". Nothing but a bunch of thieves and liars.

I was a little suprised the other day when I was flicking through the notes for their SEO webinar and saw that graph.

Just for general information, their webinar was free, and while I don't know what their audience was composed of, we got the invite and follow up material (including the SEO book graph) from our interactions with them the other year when they were trying to sell us on their traffic information.

I got their email with the PDF for the webinar yesterday and was flicking through the presentation and saw the graph and thought exactly the same thing. It was pretty disappointing to see them not only not site SEO Book, but to airbrush out the logo as well? Very disappointing. I am definitely going to have a word with my account manager at Hitwise and express my thoughts.

Keep up the great site Aaron, this is easily the best source of SEO information on the web.

i would encourage anyone who is currently using Hitwise to drop them. I used them in the past, paying a whole lot of money and found a much cheaper solution with Compete.com. Check them out if you want something similar without the fluff.

Oversight: an unintentional omission resulting from failure to notice something

> http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+oversight

Not an oversight:

1. Browse to http://www.seobook.com
2. Navigate to article containing link graph image
3. Save image to local drive or take a screen shot
4. Open image in photo editing software
5. Select eraser tool or cut logo out using marquee tool
6. Touch up to match background color
7. Select line tool or pencil and create horizontal line (using wrong hexadecimal color)
8. Export new image
9. Insert image into Hitwise presentation
10. Ask self if it wouldn't have just been easier to contact Aaron Wall about using his graph, which may have resulted in Aaron blogging about Hitwise in the future--in a POSITIVE way.

This morning when I got in, hitwise sent through an email with an updated version of their presentation with the logo added back in.

It is a shame that they said "missing references to some of the resources used" instead of "missing references to some material we sourced through Seobook.com". Kind of looks like a half measure and implies that it was a trivial omission.

Just thought you might like to know.

Listened to the Webinar last night & the presenter quite clearly mentions where the image is from, also some reference to SEO4Firefox later on.

what the hell - that is amazing. What kind of moron wrote that thinking he could get away with it? I hope there is a follow up story re who is going to the chopping block for this major blunder :p

Aaron, sounds like maybe a sweet linkbait for you :p I recall how telling the story about how when someone sued you it turned into heaps of links for you, maybe you should sue - or at least appear to start the process - to create enough conterversy to generate some gnarly links :p

I have no desire to sue as it would distract me from other business opportunities...just wanted to highlight what they did so they would stop doing it.