Every month we tell you to make your own content not just copy and paste from periodicals you subscribe to. For us we preach it because copying real estate content for your web site doesn't help your site with search engines because hundreds of others in the real estate industry are copying and pasting it.

This week we had a look into the other side of why its not appropriate to copy content. Marcie Geffner, a prominent and renowned expert in real estate topics contacted us about what content that we had on sites that we purchased years ago from a content provider. Apparently some of it was hers and was sold to us without premission. We immediately took action as we would expect others that have taken our content without permission.

However the conversation we had really enlightened us and we wanted to give an insight many don't think of.

Marcie writes for the pulse of the real estate and financial icons that influence us on how to act  when it comes to real estate, mortgages and finance. LendingTree.com and Realtor.com are two of many.

She doesn't jsut write whatever comes to her, she researches the topic extensively so her content is more accurate and ,most importantly, more informative. Her passion and responsibility to the word gives the content she writes much more power than those that just write at deadline with no real forethought.

As we listened, she told us she regularly has to send cease and desist letters to agents that copy her content at inman news and reallty times. Many cut and paste verbatim what she wrote but selectively omit her copyright.

Her writings is no different than an MP3 of a song and deserves to paid for its use.

Even putting her name and where it is from is not good enough. Unless you have permission you can't cut and paste any part of it. Paying for a subsription to realtytimes or inman news doesn't allow you free use of the content.

What would you do if you googled a phrase in a sentence you wrote and you found paragraphs of what you wrote (word for word) on other sites. It would bother you wouldn't.

So don't take real estate content in whole or in part and paste it to your real estate website. Now that you know its unethical AND it really doesn't help you with search engines, write your opinion about it. You search engine rankings will thank you and clients will thank you for reading an original thought not the same thing on hundreds of sites when they google a real estate topic.