With thousands of online businesses striving on the internet nowadays, it may be difficult to develop something unique on your own. Although scouting the internet for ideas and checking out the competition is normal, overdoing it may get you tagged as an internet scavenger. Below are some indicators on how to determine if yours is a scavenger website.

Your website has content scoured from your competitor’s most prominent ideas

In most cases, creating your own blog posts and articles can take too much time and effort. Since content sharing is a valid internet principle, this is often used by website developers to make life easy for themselves. However, this principle can be abused when writers (or re-writers) “borrow” content word for word from their competitors. It is often justified by the fact that the original writers will never know, and what they don’t know can’t hurt them.

Your website accomplishes phoresy by “hitching” a ride from others

Phoresy, in zoology, is a special kind of commensal relationship in which one organism attaches itself to the host for the purpose of mobility and transfer. In internet terminology, this can refer to online hitchhiking, where one website or developer “attaches” itself to another website to move forward. One way of accomplishing this is by adding all followers of a competitor blog site to yours. It is an easy way to create followers who are most likely to accommodate your request given that your website is similar to the competition. 

You mimic other people’s website

When somebody thinks of an original idea and beats everyone to it, the applause usually dies down ten seconds later after another website uses the same idea and starts getting even more attention. It may be discouraging to know that nobody really pays attention to who did it first, so mimicking websites is a temptation you may not be able to resist. You may oftentimes wait for your competitor to think of something great, and then convince yourself that your “adjustments” made the idea so much better. 

You ambush-attack your competitor’s website

If you wait for your competitor to make minor mishaps, then pounce on them as soon as they do, then you have gotten yourself a window of opportunity to bring the competition down and promote yourself. Although this may seem a little too cynical, you have somewhat convinced yourself that online business is a cut-throat industry, and that only the fittest will survive. 

You blacklist your competition out of their client’s list

An attack on the mother ship can be the last course for most people. Like in the other instances mentioned above, it is easier to destroy your competition’s relationship with its client than to build and strengthen your own. It is almost never a fair game to play, but experience and lack of internet ground rules may justify for this action.

Although all these cases do happen in real life, it doesn’t mean that we are all apt to follow. The points mentioned here are given to serve as an eye-opener to things that should be avoided to bring about good karma to your business. Confusius’ Golden Rule is always a wise advise to follow, “Do unto others what you want others to do unto you.”

Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com