Okay, so ive been reading other threads and everybody differs in their view on whether we should rewrite the articles so we dont get penalized by duplicate content, or submit the original article. Well its hard to go through every thread to read everyones opinion so lets have this thread just for that, with a nice poll so we can keep track of who favors what. Thanks for all votes and feedback everyone leaves!
Search engines are supposed to be able to detect the original. I guess if 200 articles all link to a certain page its fair to say that page is the source. The problem is that search engines don't get it right all of the time.
duplicate content isn't that big of a deal. go to ezinearticles, pick a random old article, and copy/paste a sentence into google. it'll show up in tons of other places as well. however, if you want to be safe you can always change the content. the most effective way to do it is this: split the article into paragraphs, and have multiple versions of each paragraph. the paragraph should say the same thing, just in different words. the mix up combinations of the above. if you have three paragraphs and three versions of each one, you now have 27 (3^3) unique articles. with 5 and 5, 3,125 unique articles
I think you forgot the poll... Still, it's pretty simple, IMO. So you can sometimes find articles on obscure sites that aren't yet indexed and will easily be indexed on your site quickly (if you have decent trust/pr). Mostly if you copy an article from another site, it will only get rank above the original if you change it AND your site has higher trust-rank. Even if you change it, and google indexes it, it is hard to get it to rank above the original, because the original has likely been in the google-index longer so it is clear that it is in fact the original. One of the reasons for changing the text is that then the 'duplicate content' flag doesn't get applied and you get a chance at ranking above the original.
I submit the original article and hope the search engines can sort it all out. (Hmm ..maybe that's partly the reason for me being in supplemental limbo.)
The poll is there with 4 votes already, i dont know what you are talking about. Great feedback everyone, thanks!
Apparently I opened the thread when you hadn't put up the poll yet. Also 4 or 5 of us were writing at the same time - so this is clearly a popular subject.
Yes I do think so. I don't think a website is likely to rank highly in google if a high percentage of the content is duplicated from another website or even several websites.
My opinion is to submit 2 different articles. If the article is on the same topic I tend to have a more comprehensive and up to date article on my website. I also don't repeat what I already said. I do this not because of the SE's but for my users. I see now use in giving them almost the same article as they already read. IMO you have a much better chance of getting users to return if you give them more...
The best tip. With very little headache. I usually write only 4 artciles around 3 paragraphs each for promoting one site.