Why would you take a piece of content off the web and re-publish it in its entirety on your own blog?
I see this happening to my articles, and I initially assumed it was just black hat SEO. But frequently it appears it's an actual human being who seems to think he's adding value to the world by reposting something he found somewhere else.
Can anybody explain the motivation behind this?
- Him posting the full text rather than a hyperlink saves me an extra click. - Maybe it also makes it easier to talk about the article with the rest of that blogs community. - It provides another copy in case the original goes down. - If he also has other posts it provides a consistent visual aesthetic across the body of information.
It's somewhat like creating a miniature library and discussion group.
I don't find any of these arguments convincing, but they're possibilities.
The web at large however, does not fully embrace this level of detail and focus in URLs. So users do not feel comfortable using URLs to link readers to discrete packets of information, they feel safer just copying the data.
This is just a theory.