Duplicate content filters…
In response to my promotion of ArticleUnderground, Bill asks…
“I’m a long-term subscriber of yours, also one of Michael’s too. I’ve seen a lot come and go and I am finally starting to get interested now. What worries me about AU is, what about the duplicate content problems you’re going to come up against? You’ll be publishing the same articles as other people, republishing bits of those same articles again in the blogs as most likely will other people; how are Google going to rank any of these without penalising them for dupe content?”
My answer…
The research I’ve done seems to indicate that very few people actually use the things they buy. Mike limits the sets of articles to 350 members, so if only 20% of people use the articles (a generous assumption, I’d say it’s more like 10%), then only 70 (35?) people will have that article on their sites.
Just add a personalized intro, a comment in the middle and a line at the end of the article and I wouldn’t expect any dupe content problems. If you want to use a few original sentences to do the blog promotions, that may be a good idea.
I think the fear of dupe content is out of proportion to the facts. For instance, someone issues a news release and it’s picked up by hundreds of sites. Are they all blacklisted for dupe content? I don’t think so.
Also, Andy Williams (ezSEO) gave this example…
“One of my articles was published on my own site. Google indexed the article, and my site was the only place with that article. Searching for the title, I was the only site listed in Google. I then submitted that article to ezinearticles.com. I waited for Google to find it, and then searched for my title again. Guess what? Ezinearticles.com was listed as #1 and my site as #2. Even though Google knew the article originated from my site and therefore ezinearticles had “copied” it. Google still ranked the ezinearticles duplicate ahead of mine. If there is a duplicate content filter then it certainly did not apply to ezinearticles in this instance”. (page 126 of his Fat Affiliates ebook, available for free from here)
Also, Andy has 13,000 instances of one article distributed across the net and indexed by Google. If there’s a dupe content filter, why does Google display 13,000 pages indexed for the same identical article? Are all those people using it being penalized? I doubt it.
So, firstly, I don’t think many people will be using the same articles as you if you get the ArticleUnderground bundles and secondly I’m skeptical about the overblown fears of duplicate content filters.
July 19th, 2006 at 1:07 am
Very good response, Neil. Duplicate Content Can be a problem for some people, mostly the ones that have no writing skills and are in such a hurry to get something, anything on their web page. It also is Very True that most people Do Not use what they buy or download even for Free. It certainly is easy to make something your own just by doing what you say as to adding your comments to the article. As my personal opinion, I think people offering the same well written articles will only serve to solidify the importance of the subject contained in the article. Great Advise! Cheers and God Bless