Duplicate filters and how rich is Mike Liebner?
I posted a reply to a previous Article Underground comment, then thought I should share it with everyone instead of having it “buried” in a comment post…
Original comment…
“What is the value of having 400 articles that 350 other people are using? It is duplicate content unless you rewrite them. If you are going to rewrite them why not just rewrite the free articles available? 350 subscribers times $97 = $33950. 400 articles professionally written at $20 each = $8000. $33950-8000=$25950 times 12 = $311,400. Nice business plan. ”
My initial reply…
“Aww phooey, Andy! 
You know as well as I do that most of the 350 people won’t DO anything with their articles… it’s a fact of life. Of the people who do use the articles, most won’t use *all* of them, so your competition for the articles that you use may only be about 20 people… that’s not going to get you whacked with the dup filter penalty. Look at how many people use and re-use press releases! 
(I’ve written about this on the blog before, if you’d like to search for those posts [they’re linked at the bottom of this post])
And yes, it’s a very good business model. Now deduct processing fees, and then the 50% paid to affiliates for most of the sales (probably more for super affiliates… I don’t know for sure) and then the blog maintenance (deleting spam posts constantly) and time spent dealing with a team of ghostwriters. Oh, and movies, newsletters and other incentives to keep members on board each month.
BTW, there’s a cost to re-writing 350 articles in time spent… you could be doing something more productive. ”
… and follow-up…
“I took a random quote from a random article from April’s batch of AU articles and plugged my quote into Google… there were 20 matches. So a total of 20 people have used that article and got the page they used it on indexed by Google. That’s in line with my expectations. Personally, I wouldn’t say it was worth re-writing that article to avoid having duplicate content.”
There are now multiple replies to Article Underground questions at this blog… you can find them here, here, here and here! (yes, I care about linking using keyword phrases in the links, but not in this post!)
… additional comments…
There was a recent game in the World Cup [22nd June 2006] where the referee [Graham Poll] gave a player three yellow cards. In a press conference FiFA president, Sepp Blatter said, it was “incomprehensible that match officials did not intervene”. That exact phrase is found 91 times when you search for it, in quotes, at Google. I would argue that 20 pages using the same article is a very minor consideration to Google or any other search engine.
