Hey all, I've recently launched a forex-related website featuring my original articles. I'm not selling anything, I just have 2 affiliate programs within the site, but they're not the center of it at all. I was wondering if something like this could work to drive more links and traffic to my site: submitting a few original, quality articles that are already in my website to eZine, and saying in the author's box that you can find more free articles on my site. That should give me both traffic and backlinks, right? But do you think that publishing articles that are already on my site and letting other people republish them will affect the SEO of my site heavily? Am I better off writing articles exclusively for eZine, even if I'm not selling anything? thanks
You should change the articles that you submit to eZine. Write a smaller version that has enough of the text changed that it isn't considered duplicate content by the search engines.
just make sure you change more than 30% of that content, you don't want your account to be suspended for duplicates
yes, do it. The more original content articles you write, the better. Definitely. I have done this many times. Submit the article in part or even in whole. Then, in the resource box, "to read more on 'anchor text'" etc with your links. It will depend on where and how you can use the anchor text and links upon the article submitter site you use.
penalized meaning what?? duplicate content is a filter and your plan is a bad idea very likely the ezine article will rank instead of your article and steal some traffic from your site.. also I am pretty sure your article will be rejected by Ezine editors
As you say Google has a duplicate content filter (i.e. it will only display one version of the same content copied across different pages in each set of results) not a penalty per se and so, if anything, it will help rather than hinder your SEO rankings. There is a chance that the Ezine article will rank above your original one, but that tends not to happen as Google pays attention to several factors including the respective posting times. As long as you post the article on your own site first (and give Google time to index it) then Google will know that your site is the originating source and the rest syndicated copies. Rewriting the article will help, but is non-essential. Also, Ezinearticles' main concern is that the article is well written. I've often posted the same article to a couple of different sites without any problems.
Have you tried adding a link from the duplicate copy to your orignal other to aid author attribution, as per Google's Recommendations? When encountering such duplicate content on different sites, we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn't be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site's presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content. In cases when you are syndicating your content but also want to make sure your site is identified as the original source, it's useful to ask your syndication partners to include a link back to your original content. You can find some additional tips on dealing with syndicated content in a recent post by Vanessa Fox, Ranking as the original source for content you syndicate. Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation: Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file. You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped. Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines. To conclude, I'd like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site's presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out. If you check out some of the tips mentioned in the resources above, you'll basically learn how to have greater control about what exactly we're crawling and indexing and which versions are more likely to appear in the index.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html