A friend and I have 1,000 original articles between us and want to use them as the main content on a magazine type website with adsense. Some of the articles have been published elsewhere but we own the copyrights. Is there anything stopping us duplicating the articles on our new site? Would it be better to delete the articles published elsewhere?
I suggest you use only the articles that are not published any where else. You should always post articles in your own site first, then after google index the article, you then publish it else where.
The only issue with the duplicate articles is that google has already indexed them on another site, so it'll think they belong to that site as original content. If it's a small number then I wouldn't be too worried about it. Make sure you publish 20-30 original articles before you put a duplicate in there. Google won't care about a small percentage of the content being duplicated.
i agree with the above posters. if its a small percentage then nothing to worry about. but if its somewhere near half and half then i suggest you do not use those articles. Also regarding published elsewhere, are these websites yours or have you sold these articles to someone else and its their websites? btw, i think you can get around 3000-4000$ easily for 1000 articles by selling them, much more than what i think you can make with adsense for a while (just a thought )
If the site you want to put them on is strong, then the new site will outrank the others. Otherwise, those currently published will outrank the newly placed ones. You can help by linking the duplicate article back to the 'source,' which in this case would be published afterwards. Point some links at the article on the site you want to rank first.
Thanks for the advice so far. If the site worked I would publish original articles on it but I didn't want to do any more work. I'm not too sure if all the advice is correct however as at least a few articles have been published on sites which only accepts material not published before and again on a site which accepts articles which have been published elsewhere - one article in particular ranks 1 and 2 (out of 2,400,000) on google for its two word keyword. #1 goes to the link on the site to the duplicated article. Please comment on this further.
Content is king, 1000 articles would do great for an adsense website. Start publishing with the unique articles. In the mean time, hire a cheap re-writer to re-write the articles which are published elsewhere, as once published is always duplicate for the search engines. Then later, post the re-written articles, and if possible try to manage a link back from the already published articles to the new re-written ones.
Like Artifexus explained before, you don't need original content. If you're gonna publish content that is available elsewhere, but you own the copyright you can publish it at your website. If your website has enough authority to outrank the website where the duplicate article is published, yours will be higher in the SERPs. The only thing that matters is domain authority and linking power. Which page was indexed first does not matter in google. Duplicate content penalty is a widespread myth. A magazine/article website would probably the best choice for those 1000 articles you have available. Don't publish them all at a time. Go slow and mimic natural growth. So when google bot comes to your site, it will always see new content again and again. You could go with a rate of 10 articles per day and complete publishing in around 100 days, which may just be the right time as you slowly start going out of the sandbox (depending on niche and your keywords), that is if you will start with a new website.
Ten a day would be a bit fast for me. You're out of new content after 100 days, if you don't want to do any of the work then you're out of new content. You'll go down in the rankings if you don't have new content often. I'd public 1 or 2 a day and go for 2 years with new content going up. That gives you plenty of time to build lots of good backlinks and find some more content to get published.