Reprint articles

use them or not?

[chasing something]

I normally write my own content, but on one site, I absolutely ran out of articles to write!
I added a handful of reprint articles, and plan to continue doing so on this particular site, -- google gave all those pages a grey bar BTW.

Since this site is mainly an experiment to me, thats just fine, but I'm wondering what everyone thinks about reprinting articles in general.

Should we....or shouldn't we? Is it worth it for the keywords/easy content?

What about the duplicate content issue?

[rogerd]

There are different reasons to include "reprint" articles. If they are quality material and provide good information to your visitors, then use them. It sounds like you are hoping to use them for search engine traffic, which is a different story. Even though duplicate content checking is still an imperfect science, there's probably some risk there. More importantly, though, even if an article isn't flagged as duplicate content, what are the odds that it will perform well? If the same article has been reproduced on many other sites (particularly SEO-managed sites), you'll have difficulty getting much traffic.

If you use freely distributed articles, I'd recommend altering the presentation as much as possible, and rewriting the articles if the terms of use permit it. With a little effort, your content will be unique and targeted to your needs.

[swoop]

"Google added a gray bar." What does this mean? Did Google determine that the text was a duplicate of existing text elsewhere on the web and mark it with a gray bar in the search results?

[chasing something]

that is my guess...that they are duplicate content.
i got the articles at a popular free article site, so i imagine they are on several sites.