Paul McNally’s Blog

When producing a website a content rating identifies the type of content, such as language and pictorial content of the website through a method of labelling. This can be used to stop unsuitable material being displayed to the wrong people, such as sexually explicit or obscene material to schoolchildren.

The ICRA (Internet Content Rating Association), part of the Family Online Safety Institute is an independent body that produces a questionnaire for webmasters to fill out regarding the content on their websites. The answers to these questions generate a small file which contains a series of labels that can associated with a particular domain that identifies the type of content contained therein. Users can then use filtering software (sometimes integrated into their browsers as a plug-in but not always) to allow or deny access to a domain and its content depending on these labels.

The ICRA’s content rating system is totally optional and is a self-rating system where the websites administrators generate the rating themselves by answering the questionnaire, however the resulting ratings are still checked by the ICRA.
There are other methods that can be utilised by third parties to produce a content rating for your site, but these are done by others and not in the hands of the web publisher.

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With the production of a web application, especially one that is to be used for e-commerce there are a series of ethical issues and responsibilities that fall upon the website company and the ISP Host. With an e-commerce site there is the highly important issue of Personal Privacy.

Some websites hold information on their registered users, information is held and may be gathered about users. This information may range from buying habits to names and addresses and email addresses.Information that is highly

sought after in today’s capitalist, market driven society.

It is therefore important that users of a website know that their information will not be passed on to any third parties without their explicit permission or used in situations that may be inappropriate to them or others.

In the UK such provisions are made law under the Data Protection Act of 1984 (revised 1998) which states that “Data disclosed by a party to another party may only be used for the specific purposes it was disclosed for. The data can only be kept for an appropriate length of time and must not be disclosed to other parties (without consent of data owner)”¹

Information regarding how users’ information will be used should be stated clearly on the website, and not shared without explicit permission. As an example, acceptable use may be to use a members email address to inform them of new products or special offers with a newsletter, but to always give users the option to opt out of such mailings and never overdo it as this would be interpreted as spamming the user, which is not good practice and is also not profitable.

^{1 http://www.wikipedia.org – Data Protection Act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act}

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There are countless free PLR articles available on the web from websites such as articlecube but what use are these articles if when you use them your website is penalised for using “Duplicate Content”?

Parsing the RSS feeds from these websites to provide automated content seems almost useless if you don’t want to manually alter and rewrite each article by hand.

There are some tools that will attempt to do the job for you - poorly. Tools that will replace common words with synonms for example, but most of the time all they will generate is undecipherable rubbish, and we dont want to put rubbish on our sites do we?

I can understand the “duplicate content panalty” that search engines use, such as giving your page a stupidly low page rank or a total ban from the SERPS as it is used to combat scraper sites, sites which use just this content in the hope of creaming off some advertising revenue.  But what if you want to lefitimately use this content as supplimental content for your site?

Unless you rewrite each article, I would’nt bother.

I do however want to do this for one of my sites, so I’ve decided to write a Unique Content generator myself in PHP. One that works without generating unreadable rubbish. One that rephrases phrases and not just words with synonyms. One that uses a little bit of common sense. I’ll update on this as I progress.

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