I am wondering what is the most prudent thing to do with your original articles. Say you have 10 quality articles and you are trying to promote your sales based site. Now, obviously for traffic based reasons it may be more beneficial to submit these 10 articles to every article directory you can find - now what about SERPS reasons? Is it better to: 1) Submit your ten articles to one established article site like ezinearticles.com 2) Re write the 10 articles and submit those rewrites to other article sites 3) Submit the 10 articles to every article site you can find. Now i'm sure duplicate content comes into play here, so any help would be appreciated. Thank you
At one point I distributed 2 articles through ezinearticles.com - not long after I could search and find 1000s of instances of the title in googles search results. Today, I find about 7 for those articles with the rest being relegated to supplemental land. My most recent pass at article marketing has been kind of tedious but... One article is submitted to go articles. I copy and paste into the ezinearticles interface and then go back and revise/reword as much as possible. (Including the title.) It's tedious, but not as much as rewriting from scratch. I know of one article submission service which let's you do alternate sentences/paragraphs and each time they submit/syndicate they mix up the combinations in an attempt to make sure that duplicate content isn't a problem. Ultimately I think using the same base article with multiple variations in the text should be better than the exact same text. My question is always along the lines of just WHAT the threshold is for duplicate content. That is part of the secret sauce though and I doubt we'll have a good clue on that.
This has been always a subject that interest me and I never got proof. I have submitted the same article to the same 4 or 5 top article sites without being harmed. I never seen it hurt me in SEO despite the fact I have read many posts on duplicate content. I would love someone to show me (proof) where they submitted the same article to 4 or 5 sites and it has hurt them in their rankings, SEM, etc. I only ask for this prove, because it is indeed tedious to change the words to submit to each site but worth it if it is a factor in SEO/SEM. If it doesn't matter, you would be much more productive submitting the same article to 4 or 5 of the top sites for SEO/SEM purposes. Thanks p.s. Those who try to make money selling software to rearrange the words of an article does not count as proof. As far as I can tell, they will sale the virtues of their software to make a profit even if it isn't true.
I only do unique articles for each site I submit to..it's a pain but well worth the effort of not being dupe'd and thrown in the supplementals.
Okay - having the identical same text spewed to 100000 or so sites isn't going to PENALIZE you. It just wouldn't benefit you as much long term as if they were all unique. Because at some point most all of those will be distilled down to 1-10 at the most. i.e. it won't hurt, you won't see penalties, but your not going to see as big a benefit. On the other hand if you can make a few modifications with each major directory you submit to, there may be some duplicate content filtering happening and instead of the 0-10 you may see 20-30 backlinks depending on how much variation you've introduced. I've not said that the search engines will penalize your site if you have bunches of duplicates in article directories. They really could care less, because they FILTER OUT DUPLICATION when they see it. (In other words, they'll just ignore lots of those links.) I've seen it first hand as I described above. I had one article that got distributed to about 10,000 sites. A week afterwards I was overjoyed to see that the articles was that widespread. I was thinking about all those great backlinks.... That was about 5 months ago. Today that article is indexed as being in about 7 places online. It didn't DISAPPEAR the articles were filtered out because they were duplicates. Some of the 7 that are currently showing up as fragments of the article have had text changed by whoever scrapped the content. My site wasn't penalized for it I just didn't get as MANY backlinks as I could have if I had made alterations which is why I do that now. Where it WILL hurt YOUR site is if you go and fill YOUR site with exact duplicates of what someone else has written. (i.e. scraping wikipedia without alteration for example.) i.e. I doubt the wikipedia article will be supplementaled - but yours probably will assuming 1) you haven't changed it enough 2)the wikipedia article isn't changed frequently. I suspect in evaluating identical content they'll probably acknowledge the page with higher PR as the one to list and any copies will be in the supplemental. I think the big question is "how much has to be different for the search engines to not care".
I would suggest to to focus on just a few articles directories (the most popular). Submitting the same article to as many article directories as possible won't do any good.
I recently read about article directories and duplicate content while just doing some general SEO research, and I was astounded by the number of people who have a considerable misconception about the issue. Duplicate content comes into play when the exact, identical material is republished over and over. Now, quite naturally, as it is the internet this will happen sometimes. But it really is of no benefit to you to submit those exact same articles, with absolutely no change to several article directories. It's best to alter them a bit for each directory. That may help you in many more ways than you can think. You may rank for different keywords because you slightly altered your articles. You may end up getting more traffic because you will appeal to more people who may be searching for "your article" but are using a different set of phrases than your original article. You stand more of a chance to be looked upon as an expert in your niche because you are diverse, you don't dish out the same content over and over in every place that you can. Anyhow, I'd say do a rewrite, if only a light one, for each article. Your chances of reaping the benefits long term are much better if you do it that way.