Article content and SE penalities?

Hi there,

I need some help understanding a few things about article writing and duplicate content. Firstly, I must say that I’m sold on article writing and the difficulty will be finding time to write ORIGINAL content. Now as I was pondering my plan of attack something hit me that I am having a little trouble understanding. So here are my questions:

1)If I go nuts and start writing a fair amount of articles for my website and blog and submit them to article depots, will I get penalized for duplicate content since others will be using them on their sites?

2)I have researched and found a fair amount of articles relevant to my industry that will be valuable for my readers. Most of the author articles allow me to repost them on my site. Will I be again penalized for duplicate content?

Sorry if these questions are redundant or stupid but I need to get my head around this before I invest significant amount of time.

Can someone please provide me with some feedback and clarify what is classified as duplicate content and their penalties? If I am paranoid please feel free to tell me.

Thanks
Frank

 

1. I don't think so, because if theirs gonna be a dupe content penalty it would have to go to sites that added the same page AFTER someone else.
2. More likely yes, but I think the dupe content penalty isn't as widespread as thought. I think if you copied their entire html code line by line then yes maybe, but if your using your own site format, headers, navigation, etc. you'd probably be safe. But, then again you might not.

 

I hate to be the one to simply repeat rumors, but I've read contradictory statements on here recently. Take them with a grain of salt.

An experienced webmaster was talking about how he had 1000s of unique articles that were stolen from him, reposted on other sites without permission, and he was eventually penalized. The way he explained it, Google goes with the strongest page that seams most deserving of the link. If this is accurate, than any powerful site could blatantly steal content from a small site. I'm not sure if it's true. I just wanted to throw that out there to add confusion.


Here's what I do know. While Google is very important, the quality of your site is just as important. If you do not have enough information to keep a visitor sticking around and wanting to come back, you have failed. I'd focus on getting as much content as possible. In the end, the goal is to make as much money as possible. Whether that's get as many visitors to the site as possible or getting the ones that come around to stick around, I'm not sure yet.

Brandon

 

If duplicate content would penalize a site then it would be easy to penalize your competitor! I don't think it is as people say.
What probably happens is that one would get up the SERPS and the other one would likely go down a lot looking like it was penalized

 

hmmm ... just as I thought. There are many thoughts around this. I wonder if any of our DP members have concrete evidence as to what really is the scoop on this. I would really like to see some sort of concrete evidence because if the penalties are distributed I surely do not want to be penalized for authentic and original content that others may use on their site or vice-versa. I guess the other alternative would be to publish content and NOT make it available to other sites BUT this would defeat the purpose of building inbound links. You would defintiely benefit in terms of having content on your site but it would surely minimize the building of in-bound links.

Any thoughts? yfs1 what is your take on this?

Frank

 

Interesting link ...
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=35264

looks like the jury is still out on this!

 

If duplicate content causes sites to get penalized, then why is it that everytime I submit an article to EzineArticles.com, their site is what shows up at the top of the SERPs, when I do a search for my submitted article.

 

Good point Chopster! I'm going to take a devil's advocate position on your question but realize that I DO support article publishing as a traffic generator and SERPS builder.

Now consider this, if you write an article and search for that specific article it'll probably come up in SERPs. My understanding is that if someone uses your article on their site and they have a more relevant site and higher PR than yours or even EzineArticles.com or other articles sites, that their site will come up (better SERPS than you) but with your article. If you are posting your article on your site, that could be why your site is not showing up in the SERPS (low PR? poorly opimized page etc).

Personally, I don't care too much about that as long as they acknowledge me as the writer , link back to my site and so forth. BUT if we take the comments of others (in all sorts of threads) then according these individuals, your site was the poster of the original content and you should not be penalized thus giving you the better SERPS? Now you know why I started this thread, there is so much info out there that its hard to sift through the myths and incorrect info.

Anyways, I think the key is, writing an article that is broad enough to list well in SERPS for not JUST the title of the article but its contents and specific keywords, phrases and information within that article. I term this approach as "broad reaching" your article. Then optimizing that article on a single page of your site.

Example: Consider an octopus, the main membrane is the head and its mouth (located in the main membrane) is the mechanism used to feed itself! HOWEVER those fancy dancy tenticles "GATHER and TRAP" potential food sources. An article should have a clear and concise topic but have those little tidbits of information in it to draw "additional prey" into the article. I think you know what I'm saying.

Anyways, I am really starting to wonder whether this dup content penalization stuff is just a "mythunderstanding" within the SERPS world or whether it even plays an important/significant role in SERPS. I have yet to find credible evidence to proove that dup penalties even exist. I was hoping that others in the DP community could educate me and provide additional insight but am still waiting for concrete evidence. The only evidence I have found is duplicate sites on multiple domains being penalized and some even being delisted.

Hope this sheds a bit of light!
Frank