Considerations

If the time has come for you to promote your brand new service or partnership with us and found some of our content on ScienceTraining.io useful, it’s normal for you to think you may just “borrow” our content and use it on your website. Believe it or not, this idea can prove to be really bad for you. Before creating your content, it’s best that you go through the following considerations.

1. Search engines can penalize your website

Search engines read every bit of information you have on your website, unless otherwise explicitly instructed (which rarely happens). Search engines use specific algorithms to read and analyze your content, compare it to existing content on the web, evaluate it and score it according to a host of criteria, such as relevance, originality, structure, quality of copy, performance, readability and other optimization criteria.


1.1 Copyrights and usage rights


1.1.1 If you’re thinking about copying some of our content, then you don’t own the copyrights for it. We probably have all rights reserved for any content found on our website. If it’s content that somehow search engines cannot read, we may come up with an agreement regarding the type of use you need it for. But if it’s about search-engine-readable content, obtaining permission to use it may not be as easy.


1.1.2 Copied search-engine-readable content can really get you in trouble with regard to your content ranking well on search engines. Search engines have a way of discriminating whether a content is partially or entirely similar to some other, older content on the web. If you use copied passages of text, they will be classified as duplicate content, landing you a great deal of penalties. Copyright infringement, included. That is to say, your painstakingly developed, beautiful website will just get lost at the bottom of search results. So, you cannot really use copied content. Usage rights are standing in your way.


1.2 Duplicate content breaks your marketing

By the same token, duplicate content will have a negative effect on your marketing. You cannot promote a web page suffering from severe penalization. Search engines will see through it and further penalize your website. Creating your own, original content will actually do the job for you.


1.3 Borrowing content using references and citations

If you really have to “borrow” a chunk of content from us, there is an indirect way you can go about it. Produce an introductory passage, making sure there is at least one citation to our page, where the original content can be found. Then, (possibly right after the introduction) place a link to our page, as a reference, for your users to be able to read the full, original content. You should never directly copy content from another source. It will do you more harm than good.


1.4 Original content is what you need

The only effective way to best serve your customers is to generate your own original content. Even if you can get a few ideas from our own content, writing your own copy, in your own words, is the only way to avoid all technical and legal issues arising from copying.


1.5 The advantage of back-linking

The best way to be part of a community that provides useful content for your customers, is to actually understand the subject matter and produce original content for it. Then, you can approach different sources of content and make a deal for linking to their content. They will most probably link back to yours. This is an extended version of what we used to call “a ring of websites” a few years back. There are advantages to that. The most important one is you can use other websites as a channel to bring traffic towards your own.

2. Logo style guide and media kit

2.1 Quality

Whether you are a reseller or affiliate partner, it is important that you keep quality at top level. This tells your customers there is serious effort being put into your business. It is a way to indirectly improve your sales. To do that, simply use the ready-made assets, as provided with our media kit.

High quality is really important for us, too! If you use our brand in a makeshift way, you may be hurting it! You wouldn’t do that on purpose, would you?


2.2 Customer logos

In addition to copyright considerations in section 1.1, the use of registered logos or trademarks is subject to regional, international or federal law. Written permission is needed to publicly use them. By that token, you cannot use our customers’ logos in public content. You might use them in private presentations if you see fit, at your own risk.


3. Social media

Social media is an entirely different case. There is some additional flexibility in using existing content, inherent to this type of media.


3.1 Re-posting and sharing

You can actually re-post or share content we’ve created and posted on social media, as most popular media will provide you with this handy feature. Reposting and sharing come with a specialized format that allows said media to know the origins of the content, often allowing readers to know where the content originally came from.


3.2 Embedding content

Sometimes, there is a presentation, video or audio content, interactive media of sorts, etc. you’d like to use to quickly inform your customers about a certain subject. That’s extremely easy, most of the time. All you need to do is head off to the web page your favorite content is on, find the “share” button and navigate through the available options to find out if there is one called “embed”. If so, you can copy the code snippet provided and place it on your web page accordingly. Be sure to test it and make sure it displays properly before moving on to your next task. If, on the other hand, you can’t seem to find an “embed” option, it most probably means that we’ve not allowed for this specific piece of content to be embedded on other web pages. If that’s a problem for you, please drop us a line and we’ll try to make it happen for you!