As a valued blog reader, I’d like you to see my brand new 13-minute movie…

Destroying The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth!

If you’re worried about using “Private Label” articles on your website because Google will “ban” you, or you won’t get top rankings, or you’ll be put in the “Supplementary Results” index… this movie is one to watch!

Hopefully it will clear up any confusion about how Google deals with duplicate content.

Enjoy!

(If my server can’t handle the load, please try again later!)

PS, I’ll also show you where to get 10,000 quality PLR articles for under 7c each!

Early feedback… “Thanks for that great video Neil! That has answered a whole load of questions and got me very excited about PLR articles”!

I was sent a question about PageRank… specifically, how can you best link your website pages together to maximize your PageRank?

Well, firstly, a few caveats…

1: If you try to boost PageRank at some pages in your site, realize that other pages will suffer… they will lose PageRank. You only have a certain amount of PageRank coming into your site. Be sure you know where you want to target it before you try distributing the PageRank.

Do you want your “homepage” to have the lion’s share of the PageRank (if your site is targetting one highly competitive keyword), your “category” pages (if your site targets several reasonably competitive keywords, one per “category” page) or your “article” pages (if your site targets many long-tail, low-competition keywords from many different “article” pages).

Note, the distinction of “homepage”, “category” and “article” pages may mean different things in your site structure… but I’m basically using it to mean “one”, “several” and “many” pages.

2: Make sure you’re only linking pages within a site. Linking multiple sites together can look artificial to the search engines and can require you to have different websites on different IP-blocks which means different webhosts, and that can be a hassle. If you’re going to attempt linking multiple sites together, be prepared.

OK, so the simple answer is that how you link your pages really depends on which pages within your site you want to have PageRank. Point as many “donor” pages to the “recipient” pages as you can, and don’t have links back to the donor pages unless you include the “nofollow” tag.

Michael Campbell made a post at his blog that I found interesting. He’s now using smArticle Composer for Adsense sites and XSitePro for affiliate revenue sites.

The use of smArticle Composer is because it gets very, very high clickthrough rates and so earns the maximum amount for the traffic each site receives. It’s also shockingly fast at building site.

I’ve built sites using smArticle Composer and I can see why the pages get lots of clicks (just check out the examples in the sales letter to see for yourself). However, the sites are very basic. Naturally you can edit the templates by hand (yeugh) or get someone else to do it for you, but the problem you’ll encounter, most likely, is that people won’t link to the site naturally.

It’s all well and good to get your own links by submitting articles or submitting to directories but real sites grow links organically because they’re useful and so people link to them as references. When sites grow links organically you won’t have to worry about maintaining your PageRank or traffic.

So the line is drawn… are you going to build Adsense sites with articles that “survive” in the search engines but don’t get organic links and only get inward links because you do the hard work of building them, or are you more attracted to building true quality sites that get links organically because other webmasters want to link to them as resource sites? 

Neither strategy can really be called “right” or “wrong”. It’s down to your own preference at the end of the day. Personally, I can see that living on the edge with a ton of sites that are “surviving” in the search engines in July 2006 may not be a good place to be in July 2007.

In response to yesterday’s promotion of Joel Comm’s “Instant Adsense Templates” (now sold out), I got a lot of emails saying that Joel had violated the conditions of PrivateLabelMonthly.com’s membership terms by repackaging their content for resale.

All I can say is that I got an email from Joel before I sent my mailout saying…

“Rest assured that I have spoken with Michael Santiago at PLM and everything is just fine. We had a misunderstanding and it has been worked out professionally and responsibly.”

That information, along with the fact that Joel was still offering the product, swayed me to thinking that the situation had been resolved and I felt I could do a promotion.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me saying that PLM had told them not to buy Joel’s product. I appreciate you guys keeping me informed. Presumably that email was sent before the two parties reconciled. I’m sorry for the confusion, but, as far as I’m aware, the situation was resolved amicably.

If anyone knows anything to the contrary, please let me know by posting a comment.

Update:

I found this at LostBallInHighWeeds… reported to be an email from Mike Santiago of PLM…
—-
As a valued subscriber of our list, here is the latest update regarding the product InstantAdsenseTemplates.com.

This evening I spent a couple of hours on the phone with Joel Comm. I did my best to rectify the situation and to ensure that membership interests are maintained. It took some time but we managed to come to an agreement. To our paid members, you should have receieved our email regarding this.

Thank you again for all your patience and support.

Warm Regards,
Michael Santiago
PrivateLabelMonthly.com
—–

So I guess that’s the end of the story… and the moral is, “read the terms and conditions carefully!”

Second update…

Also found this post at the Warrior Forum…

—
Hi Warriors,

Someone pointed me to this thread and thought I should make a public statement.

First off, there were definitely some issues regarding content used to create Joel’s IAT product. I’ve spent the day on the phone and emailing Joel talking this over. I have to say Joel is a complete stand up guy and I don’t take anything away from him being a respected marketer. That said we’re still working out some details but it was a misunderstanding that is being resolved.

Secondly, I can say for sure that my members at PrivateLabelMonthly will benefit in light of this temporary setback. I will finalize the details and all my members will know when it’s settled. Should be tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning.

Thanks again for those who emailed me and offered advice…it was all considered and greatly appreciated. So, as of right now there are no longer any issues with the sale of Joel’s product. I would like to request a Moderator to close this thread since there is no longer a need for discussion.

If you are a member of PLM please forward any request or comments to:
http://privatelabelmonthly.com/support

Thank you.

Regards,
Mike Santiago

—

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.

Another great question about Article Underground… you guys are really getting value for money from me for this promotion!

“Hi Neil,

I notice that you are recommending both ArticleUnderground and Liz Sherwoods Adgold Rush.

I wonder which would be the preferred choice if one had money only for one. Also I have a concern about ArticleUndeground. The 400 articles that one gets every month cover a wide range of topics. How does one go about using them if one wants to operate with an optimum minimum of domain names and sites. Because each domain name involves USD 5-7 and each new hosting ( for IP Diversity and theme focus ) involves USD 10 per month. And the wide subject range of the Articles can involve upto 50 domain names and hosted sites.

I am sure there must be a way to use sub domains and build the article content sites around a web like structure. But can people with little experience do it, and justify the money spent on AU. I’m sure there must be a way to maximise the use of the 400 articles with a minimum of websites. Can you explain and throw some light on this aspect, please.

Am I missing something?”

My reply…

I’d have to recommend AdGold first, because that provides 20 pre-written articles for each niche site… and 12 niches per month. Article Underground is very good for providing additional content for each site you have built or will build and for promoting your pages using their blog system. I think both dovetail wonderfully together and I’m trying not to say that one without the other would be only 25% as effective.

Think of each “main” site you build (the Adgold sites) as the “main meal“. It’s nice to have a main meal… the meat, the veg… great. Lots of people build “main meal” sites and move on to the next site, and the next site…

Now think of adding Article Underground articles as adding the “extras” that make a meal really special… the starter, the soup, the side salad, the glass of wine, the lighting, the ambient music, the dessert, the coffee, the mint with the coffee.

You’re a search engine. Which site do you visit? A main meal site, or a site with a main meal and all the extras? (more important, which site will you score highly in your search engine results?)

(by the way, don’t think you have to build a site around every article you get from AU… 400 articles is a ton… it’s almost too many to work with… until you realize that using some of the articles to add to your niche sites… the on-topic ones from your sets of 400 is, IMO, the smart way to use them.)

As for the domains, yes, you could use subdomains, but I don’t know what impact that would have on your SE rankings. As each site costs $8 per year, aim to have each site make $8 per month and each domain will easily pay for itself. Then consider if each site made $8 per week… per day…

As for separate IP addresses… I don’t see why you’d need separate IP addresses for each of the sites… just don’t inter-link them. If you have a few feeder sites, just link them one-way to the main site. As long as the main site has lots of other links pointing to it, the few from your feeder sites shouldn’t be a problem at all. Only if you want to inter-link sites should you be concerned about IP addresses… and that becomes a huge amount of work.
See the answers to other questions about Article Underground here, here and here. (!)

It looks like I’ll have to start a category just for AU questions!

Here’s the latest one…

“A quick question about your Article Underground recommendation; assuming I setup 2 sites a day, so by the end of the week had 10, how long before I could expect to see the $97 monthly fee covered?”

And my reply…

“Wow… you really expect an answer to that?

It depends on a huge number of factors, some of which are…

• How many pages are in your sites?
• How well will you integrate ads so that they get clicks?
• How much promotion will you do for each site, and will you use effective or ineffective promotion?
• Will you be building feeder sites for each site?
• Will you be running blogs alongside the sites?
• Will you be getting $1 per click because you’ve reduced the number of ads on the page, or $0.10 per click because you’ve over-saturated the pages with ads?
• Did you choose your domain names wisely?
• Did you add any totally original content to your sites?
• How long will the “big engines” take to visit?
• How long will it be until your sites get into the search engine indexes?

In short, I have no idea.

Seriously, this is kinda answered in my other Article Underground answer post…

..it’s the fact that sites make money month after month which will see you recovering the $97 fairly soon.

I can tell you I took a domain name on the 21st June which was visited by bots on the 23rd and 24th because I posted at two AU blogs promoting just one page. That page has seen Google traffic from SIX different searches and I got my first Adsense click yesterday… the 27th. The first visitor from Google was on the 24th… just three days after taking the domain name!

So, it depends… but it can be pretty fast.

A person interested in Article Underground sent me this question…

“Can you make more than $97 a month from Adsense on 40-50 articles? Since they aren’t targeting a specific niche, it’s impossible to use more than a handful of the articles.

Perhaps after 6-7 months, it starts to add up, as you can gradually start using more and more of the articles. Or am I missing something? I’d appreciate your input.”

…and here’s my answer…

“The article pages you used and paid for in month one will still be making money in months 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 etc.

So you don’t need to recover the $97 for each month in just one month. Perhaps your 50 article pages make $1 each per month… you’ll make $50 in months one, two, three, four, five etc. You’ll be in profit after month two. If your article pages only make half that… 50c per month each, you’d be in profit after four months.

The same applies to the articles used in every subsequent month… the profits add up over time… month on month on month after the initial “payback”.

I’ve made up the numbers for illustration purposes. I don’t know if your article pages will earn $1 or 50c per month… it would depend on the rest of the sites they’re part of and the topics/keywords of the articles.”

Someone please check my math.

The point is, you’re using genuine content to build quality sites for the long term. Once a site starts generating revenue, it will do it for months and months… perhaps years and years… that’s the payoff.

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.