Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been lurking for a while and have now decided to tap into this fountain of knowledge :-) Thanks for all your incredibly enlightening posts.
I'm keen on maximizing my Google AdSense revenue (not too controversial I know :-)
The advice I read again and again is to regularly provide fresh unique content on an area you love. That's great and I've had my article writing hat on more and more recently.
I'm keen to build links and link popularity by submitting my articles to other websites and including a link back to my site.
However, if I do this, doesn't this de-value my content in Google's eyes in the sense that it is no longer unique content?
Also, I discover articles that I'd like to put on my own site all the time (with permission of course) but am worried about Google identifying my site as a provider of duplicate content.
Your thoughts on this would be very much appreciated. :-)
James
Always write your own copy or pay someone to write it for you. Why would a user come back to your site if it's full of articles that are on other sites?
The only way to make serious revenue online is to work hard and always produce unique content ;)
A lot of people seem to use syndication to great effect, but how I would handle it is by having one version for syndication alone and a different version, substantially rewritten and possibly expanded or illustrated, for your own website.
Article syndication is the same thing as duplicate content, but it's a completely valid way to get visitors, via links, to your site. But, don't count on these links to help your Google rankings, count on them to bring you visitors only. Since your article on the other person's site is also considered duplicate content, that page will also be penalized in serps so the inbound link will have no effect on your page rank.
I hope I explained well enough and accurately. This is something that I heard first hand about from a Google engineer in New Orleans this past June while listening in on a conversation another webmaster was having with the Google rep.
it's a completely valid way to get visitors, via links, to your site. But, don't count on these links to help your Google rankings, count on them to bring you visitors only. Since your article on the other person's site is also considered duplicate content, that page will also be penalized in serps so the inbound link will have no effect on your page rank.
I usually see a short-term traffic spike from articles sent to the article directories for distribution; it's due mostly to being picked up in RSS feeds or possibly ezines for a week or so. Then you have to go back and write more articles.
Long term, though, there does seem to be a benefit in boosting anchor text count.
The one downside is that webmasters will often put up a brand new page to display your content, so until the engines pick up that page, the link to your site won't have any effect. This is more of a long-term strategy.
I've used this to great effect on one of my sites. Within about 2 months, my site shot up from obscurity to the #1 or #2 position for the main keyword on 2 of the 3 big engines. I'm not saying it will work that fast for you if you're in a highly competitive niche, but for those without a ton of competition, I highly recommend it. Oh, and make sure the link(s) you embed in the article have good anchor text. And vary it from article to article so they look natural to the engines.
Have a look at
[webmasterworld.com...]
to find out more about duplicate content and canonical pages.
What we do is to make sure that we publish the article first on our site, and then submit it to others a few weeks or months after (e.g. we dont change the article in any way when we submit it to others - just too much work). This way the SEs have already crawled the article on OUR site. As to duplicate penalty, I don't think our site has been affected by our occasional sharing of our content as we are still consistently tops on our niche. Just don't give everything away.
Up until now I've held off putting the stories on our site primarily because of the duplicate content concerns, but ideally I would like to -- to derive more Adsense income and to provide more info to our users. My main concern is that because the story goes onto the newspaper's site first, if I was to add it later we'd be tagged as duplicate content -- even though we are the authors!
Would be interested in hearing any suggestions.
For those stories only, you could put them up as a graphic file or perhaps several graphic files spread over several small pages. As a bonus, this also gives you the option to use some cool fonts as well. The obvious downside is the page size and bandwidth. But if it is only for a small segmant of your site . . .
1) Will free articles increase my SERPs?
Probably not, but it appears to just penalize the page and not the whole web site.
2) Will free articles increase my AdSense income?
Very possibly as you give visitors to your site more pages to look at and more opportunity to display a more diverse variety of ads which may catch their attention.
I use some from various sources and my channels claim they are making money.
What more do you want?
Many thanks for all your input here, it's been really interesting weighing up the pros and cons of this.
Just to be clear on something - I have no intention of flooding my website with poor quality articles just to try to eek an extra dollar or two out of adsense. Above all, it should be a joyous and enlightening experience to visit my website, not tedious :-)
I do want to distribute my own articles to get my name and website known and I believe it will be genuinely useful for my visitors if I'm displaying articles that I find *genuinely* valuable and interesting, and that are related to my own.
After all, in Google's own words, you should build your website for the visitor, not the search engine.
From your replies, it seems that the worst-case scenario is that I get 'duplicate-content flagged' for a page or two and they get dropped from Google's index, or SERPS at least. But if I've got plenty of happy, regular visitors to the site and they're recommending others, I'm probably not going to mind that too much anyway.
And it seems the chances of that are fairly minimal, if I'm producing plenty of unique content on a regualr basis.
After careful consideration I intend to concentrate on what my visitors will find useful and interesting (while still being mindful of good SEO of course).
After all, it's *genuine* value to the visitor that makes a good website and helps it endure, right? :-)
James
