Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am starting to write articles for my website and as I write and post those articles on my site, I also would like to add them to other article directories with one link back to my home page and another to the original article.
After reading some related posts here, I understand that it is recommended that after adding the article on my page, I change the content on my article a bit before submitting to article directories. Now I am not completely convinced of this idea as it would require a lot of work and very little return, or low ROI and I will explain shortly why I think the return would be minimal.
I understand that if I copy my original content as is on to article directories, google will consider one of us as duplicate and would probably remove the one with the lower PR (** see footer note on this), which would be me as I am a pr0 right now. I agree that having my original article removed from google, I stand to lose direct traffic from google, but....
1) I would assume that any article, well a somewhat decent article would be copied over by other sites, which could all potentially hurt that chance of getting a direct hit from google for that article page. For all I know, google may consider me the duplicate despite someone else copying the article and thus omit me from the SERPS.
2) Even if I somewhat modify the article before posting it on other websites, the two pages would still compete on the same keywords on a google search, and mine being from a lower pr, the other website would rank higher or way higher and would take most, if not all, possible visitors from the search.
Thus I tend to lose ground (in terms of getting direct visitors from google) whether or not I modify the articles and hence the little return I was talking about earlier.
If I did not modify the content I may save some time and effort but more importantly I could possibly paste the same article on multiple article directories earning more backlinks and pagerank. But here is where the dilemma is in my mind and the million dollar question to all the web gurus out here - <b>when google finally indexes all these duplicate article pages from the multiple article directories it would remove all but one of them. Would it still consider the backlinks and the pagerank from the duplicates pages?</b>
I welcome all thoughts, opinions, and experiences.
** (footer note) I am not sure if google would choose the duplicate copy based on PR or by way of the backlink to the original article. If it does choose the way of the backlinks then I have absolutely nothing to lose even with the duplicated copy on other sites.
Also, there are two threads about Duplicate Content (cross domain) in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. Those should also provide some insight.
