I was thinking about adding a bunch of articles from article directories to my site for content and SEO reasons. If I were to rewrite about 20% of each article would Google still know that the article isn't unique? Or is 20% not enough?
Hard to say. I have always heard 30%. Personally I have always taken the articles and had them rewritten. For a couple of bucks an article you can get them completely rewritten. RentaCoder, Scriptlance, GetAFreelancer, there are numerous sites you can get work like this done cheaper than you can mess with it yourself in my opinion. That way no worries about what the big G thinks.
I agree. Many has been said about duplicate contents, but I think it is just a matter of link building.
Google actually don't penalized you for duplicate content. They just ignore they duplicated ones and give full credit to the content that is published first. With that being said, it means that you don't get SEO benefits for duplicate content. However, you still gain the exposure that you want to disseminate to the community in which you posted the content. You can read more regarding the latest webmaster chat with Google in the here.
Oh ok. That's a good way to put it. So basically if I rewrite 20 articles and half of those article are considered duplicates than I only get credit for 10 of those.
Yes pretty much correct. If you think about it, popular social bookmarking sites are also using duplicate content but still have high PR of 6 and above. This shows that Google does not penalizes any duplicate content.
I will go for a complete rewritten. I always remind myself that I am rewriting for the visitors but not the search engines.
Whenever I rewrite a article, I try as hard as I can to rewrite as much as I can, I don't do copy/pasting, if you can change the order of paragraphs, like if theirs a list jumble it up a bit etc.
Idea about rewriting content is very good... But there is other side : your content must be seo friendly - good placing of keywords. Too much isn't good. So you must have skillful rewriter.
I dont find rewriting content providing any additional value to readers except for the SEO benefits. The content is basically the same except it is being rephrased. Writing for your readers does not mean reproducing same content that is rewritten. Instead, it means writing unique content ( based on own story/experience ). Reproducing content is equivalent to copying to me. Thus, there is no real value in the article. Would like to hear from others on my view.
If your main goal is money, then writing unique or rewriting other content doesn't matter. So this is kinda gery thin thing. If you like to think outside the box, then you will make some really usefull content and make some decent money. But you can make some rewriting with much less efforts and make many more content... So it depends from what you want to do. rewriting is a bit dishonest thing.
BTW amosgoh, you have a really nice looking blog. Who designed it for you? Does most of the money you earn come from Adsense or your affiliate banners?
Going back to the article rewriting. If I were to rewrite most of an article, should I still give the original writer as well as the article directory credit by including their signature?
@gregdavidson I have PM you regarding my theme design. I don't have much luck with adsense probably making $2-3 a day at most. Most of my income sources comes from affiliate banners on web hosting services and autoresponder. Gotten $1000 from this 1.5 months old blog which is consider pretty good I guess. My niche is on beginner bloggers thus it is easier to monetize by selling this 2 services. If you actually rewrite most of the article, I feel that you should still give credit to the author since you are revamping on his ideas. We should respect the authors' hard work too.