I've been thinking this week that i am far too focused on keeping the search engines happy than i am my visitors. The reason i say this is that i have ONLY been publishing unique content on my site. The articles are written by excellent journalists on the subjects we focus on - but the problem is that i normally only publish 1/2 articles a day when my readership is asking for more. A lot of very good analysts write to me asking to contribute articles and analysis to the site - but i have always said no as their articles are already published on other sites. An example today was with a superb article that came into my inbox - it was perfect - well written great argument and just right for my readers - the only problem was it had already been published on over 20 other sites - So i listened to my Webmaster and didn't publish. And it's been nagging at me ever since as i didn't publish anything else today. Now i've been looking at the big sites in the space and EVERY ONE of them publishes articles that are also published on other sites - They put their visitors First - give them what they want and Screw the Search Engines. My site is just over 4 months old - and i have been very worried about upsetting Google/Yahoo, etc.. with duplicate content - But i'm now thinking this is wrong. I should cater to my visitors first and foremost - give them the information they want - if it's been published somewhere else - so what! Will the search engines like it - Who knows - but it seems a waste, and bad business practice to put the SE's before my visitors concerns. What are your thoughts??
Always cater to your visitors first and the search engines will follow. They are way smarter than that. The whole thing about duplicate content is that it just won't rank on your site as far as I know. I don't believe they actually "punish" your site though for publishing other content. People do it every day...that's one of the points behind article directories, so people can find good content and publish it on their site for others to read. If you put your visitors first and publish a lot of other people's content, you will attract more readers and Google will see that and rank you higher because they will feel your site is more relevant.
What a refreshing thread. It's nice to see some on this board who use their brains. Yup! You NEED repeat traffic! I never was much of a fan of SEO and organic traffic. You also have to realize that just because you do the seo, it does not mean you will necessarily land high enough to be seen. In addition to that, if, IF you are lucky enough to land high, the number of visitors is not all that great. You'd be surprised. You are not "upsetting" Google and the rest of the search engines. Every night or almost every night, the spiders come in to crawl your pages. Any article that has already been indexed from another site ("duplicate content")will not be indexed again, and any unique content on your site will be indexed. There are no "penalties." That's all there is to it. Have both, unique and duplicate articles. Your visitors don't mind reading repeat articles, and they will come back, and the spiders will still have unique content to index.
Quality, unique content is always the best way to go. A lot of people will tell you that duplicate content will get you sandboxed. In my opinion, a little PLR here and there is not a bad idea, especially if you are just starting a blog or website. Just don't post everything in PLR make your own content and you should be fine.
Thanks for the advice guys - very interesting. The problem is i've been hanging out with SEO's too much and not Businessmen (i know they can be both - but not usually) So i'm going to experiment - For every two original articles i post i'll post one article that's been supplied to us through syndication - this will have a large impact on the no of articles i publish and to be honest last time i did publish a duplicate article i ended up 2nd in Google anyway - so it' worth giving it a shot. Time to put the Customer first