Offering free content

Good marketing strategy or barking mad?

[Matt Probert]

We operate an information-type web site which relies upon advertising revenue, rather than membership fees, for income. We have had the idea - after repeated requests - of offering our data in part or in full to be copied onto othetr people's web sites, thereby offering free content, under the proviso that each of the copied articles includes at the end a one line copyright notice and back-link to our originating site.

From our point of view the motivation is advertising, effectively spreading brand awareness through the back-links, a strategy which seems to be used by a number of translation web sites already.

But what do you think? Are we barking mad? Or shrewd? Some reassurance shouldn't go amiss <g>

Matt

[hunderdown]

Pick the sites carefully, and it's a good idea.

Two suggestions: require that the copied content be reproduced intact, word for word. That will ensure that the duplicate content feature at Google will exclude their copy. Also, get a link back to your site at top AND bottom.

[fischermx]

If you assume that their content will be marked as duplicated and therefore discarder, what is the purpose of the link back!?

[EVOrange]

Matt, my site does exactly that and I think it's good branding.
The other sites can use a line of js to pull events info from my site for specific cites. It is used on a number of different city sites to fill thier "wine events" page, where otherwise, they would have very little, if anything.
Since the visitor is interested in wine anyway, they inevitabley look at my content (which is brief, with a link back to me for more info) and find my site.
Things are good.

EVO

[hunderdown]

fischermx, people still DO find sites from other sites! The bulk of my traffic is from search engines, but I get referrals directly from dozens and dozens of sites. So if someone is using my content, I want links back to me....

Also, I know that dupe content is excluded from the SERPs, but does that mean--as you seem to imply--that links from dupe content pages don't pass page rank? I have never seen that stated--can you confirm that that is true?

[fischermx]

> fischermx, people still DO find sites from other sites!
Yes, you're right. I just was thinking in the search engines. Links backs are usefull here for being followed by human visitors.

> I know that dupe content is excluded from the SERPs
Yeah, right. I know that many people "knows". I know that are the so called "SEOs".
Well, I made experiments by myself. At this moment, I have 4 sites with exact same context, the WHOLE site, and all rank in SERP, both Google and Yahoo. They even have very similar names sharing all a common keyword.

Don't ask me how I fooled the search engines, cause actually I don't know. But I didn't do anything special either. Pages in this sites are plain HTML.

My question was actually a bit ironic : why to care about duplicate content and still thinking that linkbacks will count for search engines?

>but does that mean--as you seem to imply--that links
>from dupe content pages don't pass page rank? I have
>never seen that stated--can you confirm that that is
>true?

If I'd wrote a search engine and I'm about to discard pages by duplicate content, why on earth I would still considering their links? Actually, I would not even follow the links, even less to account them for page rank.
I think, if Google ever discard a page, it would be discarded all, just by common sense.

[fischermx]

BTW, just to unleash another "mistery" and very often issued question, my sites are :

www.keyword1keyword2.com
www.keyword1-keyword2.com
www.keyword1keyword2keyword3.com
www.keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com

Do you want to take a guess, which one ranked higher for keyword1 + keyword2 searches!?

Take a guess, take a guess! :)

[BigDave]

Not only are you not barking mad, but you are in some very good company. If you have not been to the site, I would suggest that you go to [creativecommons.org...] and check out their license options.

Though if you are really concerned about the links, you might not want to go with their licenses as written because they only mention that they URI be included, they do not specify an operable link, though most people would do that anyway. I suppose it all depends on what your goals are when you chose to provide the content.

[Lorel]

I wouldn't do it.

Just because your site hasn't been penalized so far, for spreading what the search engines see as "spam" this doesn't mean you won't be penalized in the future because the search engines are looking for ways to stop listing duplicate content to beat spammers.

Also, if you ever move your site or change the page that article is on then your site will get the supplemental results because it will be younger than the ones you allowed to be spread around the net.

If you just want the traffic and don't care about that pages rank, then go for it.

[shigamoto]

I've done this for my website. It's hard to measure how much success it had yet. I was a bit sceptical so I only made a couple of articles available to other sites.

The reason for my sceptism is that I figured if people find the free article on another website and reads it they might be satisfied and leave it at that.

That is they would not click the link to my website since they have already gotten the information they were looking for. I might be wrong of course but that is how I reasoned.

[Rosalind]

You might consider offering an RSS feed (or a series of feeds concentrating on different subject areas) instead of syndicating whole articles. Other sites can use this to show fresh content, but the reader is directed back to your site. Best of both worlds.

[articlestaff]

Although it would be nice if everyone who wanted to use your free content offerings toted PR7+, that's unlikely to happen. Some of the sites may fall well short of what you would expect in link-sharing arrangements.

Fortunately, that is not fatal. One is not penalized for the quality of their inbound links--the search engines recognize that you have (at best) limited control over who links to you. As long as you are not exchanging an outbound link for your content, you should not experience any penalty in that respect.

Meanwhile, you gain exposure and potential for exponential exposure by offering free content.

Insist on the backlink and publication of your articles in full (no edits). Try to select repositories that will allow you to insert your link back in keyword-rich anchor text.

And, of course, make sure your content sparkles.

If you have great content and a well-designed distribution plan, you can use article-based campaigns to increase traffic and site credibility.