Articles and Link Development: Finding the Best Approach

[PrattTA1]

I'm really excited about jumping into a link building campaign and have a handful of educational articles that I'm eager to start using. Before I did anything, I wanted to clear a couple of questions up first, and was hoping some of you kind folk could help:

Is it more valuable to host an article on your website or with an article hosting service?

If you were to host it on both and put a robots.txt file on it (the one on your website to avoid duplicate content issues), would you still get the value of someone linking to it on your site, or do you lose it because of your robots.txt file?

Should you worry about optimizing an article, or is it better to just focus on getting the link bait?

Thanks :)

[leadegroot]

If you were to host it on both and put a robots.txt file on it (the one on your website to avoid duplicate content issues), would you still get the value of someone linking to it on your site, or do you lose it because of your robots.txt file?

Yes, that would be a problem.
Instead of blocking it in robots.txt, add a noindex, follow robots meta to the HEAD of each duplicated article page on your site.
This will stop the page being indexed but pass the value of the links on to the rest of the site.
But an alternative is to rewrite the article for external publication so it isn't a duplicate Something like 'for more detail on this subject please visit [my article on my site]' is always nice link text :)

[graywolf]

If you posted the same article in two places one of them is going to get dinged as duplicate content. The result will either be your site gets pegged as dupe and the page is of no value on your site, or the page you syndicate elsewhere will get flagged as a duplicate and the link will have less value.

So dust off those high school encyclopedia report rewriting skills and say the same thing in a different way, keep one and give the other away.

[Quadrille]

Or write two and keep them both.

You'll probably gain more that way.

[kostis]

The whole approach to promote content, depends on the web resources you control.

If you don't control a high pagerank web page, yoy may create a new web page on your site which will have a low pagerank. This page will receive limited attention.
This is why people resort to article syndication.

On the other hand, if you are able (and willing) to support this page with PPC or paid directory submissions, than it's better to keep you content on your page.

K

[kostis]

To add to my previous post. There is a special case:
If you manage to develop content, targeting a keyphrase of high demand and low supply, it shall have better luck.

[PrattTA1]

Great, thanks everyone for your input. I'm leaning towards graywolf's idea of rewriting it and having it in both places. It seems like that way I would get the best of both worlds.