I was wondering if promoting a blog using http://www.zimbio.com is bad for search engine ranking. This is because at this site you basically republish articles from your blog. So if the same articles of yours are on zimbio.com and on your blog, this creates duplicate content, and duplicate content is bad for search engine ranking. so... should I use zimbio? has anyone had bad / good results using this site?
I like it and it is untapped, not many PPL here will even know what zimbio is, I have used it since it began, instant RSS submission is cool, but don't stop there also submit your web sites links to the page and categories that are relative and even create your own zimbio topics. So yeah I'd say it's good.
The duplicate thing will come about only if you are using the rss feeds to submit your content, it wont hurt your site as you had the content first - but zimbio could have content indexed first soooooo .... If it means more links to your site and in return more visitors then it wont hurt - will it ? I am not really sure, but I doubt it would be harmful in terms of duplicate content.
The links in the Zimbio articles are "nofollow" (What is nofollow?) so there is no search engine benefit. I havent checked if the comments are. The "Link lists" are all redirects, so no search engine value. It seems the only benefit may be traffic....
Mmmm not real sure, my links on youtubes "linking videos" are still being counted as web sites linking to my web site, so I guess there's an arguement that even "no follow" links have some benefit.
It's a link, but for Google (the major site for online searches by a huge percentage) there is no benefit. But not all backlink checkers are created equal. There are tons of sites to check your backlinks, and the one you are using probably isn't beneficial to figuring out what is nofollow and what isn't... getting a majority of nofollow links, aside from traffic benefits, is a waste of link building time. Shooting for dofollow links is the best for traffic, search engine benefit, and PR. A nofollow link WILL NOT help your PR. For a site similar to Zimbio but with dofollow links, check out: Gathering and Building Great Backlinks with Gather
Yeah I look in Google web master tools with sites linking to my website and that shows Youtube links - "sites linking to video" - I haven't used Zimbio for a loooong time.
Use Zimbio cautiously. I let it default to the "promote your site" option and the rss feed basically pulled my homepages. I disappeared from Google's search result. I pulled the articles back for one site and it came back in a day or two. You have to submit the articles manually (cut and paste,) instead of letting it grab them. The other, I have a lot more content for and want to wait a little while to see if I get traffic from Zimbio. However I'm pulling the rss feed from that site so Zimbio can't collect new articles.
"no follow" doesn't mean the link isn't counted, it means page rank isn't passed. It's still a backlink...
So what about this duplicate content if i publish article with backling does it counted twice or not counted at all? what if some one copies articles i publish and republish it?
I have not found the "nofollow" tag on any link from Zimbio, does it pass the nofollow tag through some redirect mechanism? I am concerned about the duplicate content as well. Does the search engines have mechanisms to detect when content is pulled via syndication and RSS feed ??? Will they still pass penalties for this duplicated content? I mean, anyone can potentially pull content via RSS and publish it right? As for the linkbuilding potential that this has, I'm sure that if you suddenly appear with hundreds of links overnight from Zimbio, it would be frowned upon. Linkbuilding as I see it has to be gradual, and natural, not just poof, you've got hundreds/thousands of immediate links correct?
Zimbio is BADDDD for your site! I just discovered it today. Their site with my articles it in were ranking number 1 using the search keywords, while my main site is nowhere to be found!!! I rank high (first 3 results) in Yahoo, MSN and Google Blog Search, but in Google... I'm not even in the first 10 pages!!! If you do not edit everything, people who will search will just read the Zimbio copy and leave. What I did was I cut the articles there and I pasted a big link there. Now the searchers are coming to my site. Lots of them. Just do not post your whole article there. Just a warning!
That is what I have been doing as well. I manually add my blog posts and just include a photo and intro/short paragraph of what is included in the post. Then, I include a 'read more' link to my blog. When I first signed up, I had my blog posts automatically imported to zimbio, but then realized I didn't like my full blog posts reprinted there, so I stopped doing that. I also noticed that if you have affiliate links in your blog posts, they get messed up sometimes and don't work when the post is displayed in zimbio. That to me is possible lost commissions. So, now I just send them to my blog instead.
Thanks to Tmikuckis, Valkerie, Thebashhh, and Janet! The duplicate content on Zimbio seems to be the problem! One of my sites disappeared from Google rankings around the time when I joined Zimbio and gave them my blog URL! I'll follow your advice and see if my site gets back into higher rankings soon!
Well in my research, i came to find out that zimbio is nofollow, and is very useless for backlinks. It can be a good source of traffic but the links are no good.