Article Marketing, Duplicate Content, Biting Yourself in the
Foot?
With the current massive growth of article marketing to
drive traffic to websites, establish credibility, and to
create backlinks for search engine optimization purposes,
there are constant queries and/or discussions related to
duplicate content.
Various measures are thrown back and forth to combat this:-
~ Author Perspective ~ Rotation of bio boxes Rotation of
paragraphs Changing keywords Changing Titles
~ Article Site Perspective ~ Niche Categories Splitting
articles into parts on seperate pages Splitting articles
into parts on the same page and intelligent use of tables or
CSS Including related article snippets on the same page
Article Directories can easily make every single article
they publish appear unique to the search engines, without
changing any of an authors original words. It is harder for
blog publishers, but it still can be achieved, and even
automated to a certain extent.
~ Rotation Can Reduce your Article Distribution ~
One of the main reasons for publishing articles is to
generate keyword focused backlinks with appropriate anchor
text. You want your article picked up by as many sites as
possible. Rotation of bio boxes does not affect
distribution Rotation of paragraphs does not affect
distribution Changing a few keywords in the article body may
reduce or increase your distribution But…
Changing the title of your articles can reduce distribution!
Lets go into this in more detail…
~ How articles are used for content sites ~
As well as writing about article publishing, my main
business model is niche marketing. Creating niche focused
websites to provide relevant information for people
searching on a particular topic.
In this article I don’t want to focus on what makes a good
or bad niche website.
When creating niche websites, it is cost/time efficient to
use various forms of automated or semi-automated tools to
collect content to display that is relevant to your
audience.
With articles and RSS feeds of articles, the primary way to
determine whether content is unique is by way of title and
author. If they are unique, it is likely that the content is
unique.
It is prevalent to source your content from multiple
locations, so you would collect articles, either manually or
automatically from multiple locations. With RSS feeds you
would subscribe to multiple RSS feeds.
If you are using good tools, duplicate content is excluded.
You wouldn’t want to post 10 different versions of the same
article on your website.
~ Rotating Titles Defeats the Duplicate Checking ~
Yesterday I was collecting articles based on Search Engine
Optimization for one of my sites. Using one of my
semi-automatic tools, I gathered together over 950
supposedly unique articles from multiple sources.
These I intend to publish, 3 - 4 articles per day, over the
next 8 months.
But I hit a problem.
When I sorted the articles by keyword density, I noticed
that there were a fair number of articles, published by the
same authors, that had different titles. Sometimes it was
just the insertion of a number, at other times just a change
of a single keyword.
Duplicate content!
With 950 articles to prepare, I wasn’t going to go through
them one by one comparing if it actually was duplicate
content or not. I took the simple option. For each author I
noticed articles that were the same keyword density, and
similar length, I JUST DELETED ALL THE ARTICLES. The author
will not get published on my site. For many of them that was
10 articles.
I ended up with a total of approximately 800 articles
suitable for publishing, and some authors would not be
included.
It cost me more than 1 hour additional time to sort through
and remove the duplicates. I could probably buy that many
private label rights articles with no worry about duplicates
in the collection, for the same expense comparing time to $
cost. But then there would be no backlinks for the authors,
and I could target the articles exactly as I want with full
rights to modify them.
~ Growing Trend ~
The idea of rotating article titles is not currently
widespread. I have noticed it on occasion in the past where
it was obviously done for tracking purposes, just an
insertion of a number, and it was easy to remove the
duplicates.
If however the trend continues, it will become more
difficult to identify individual unique articles, especially
for RSS feeds.
~ Think about it ~
It is already almost as cost effective to buy articles with
rights as use articles from article directories.
Do you want backlinks from your articles?
~ Spreading the backlinks ~
I currently like sourcing articles from multiple locations.
Many smaller article directories who have intelligently
included a link to their site at the bottom of article
content gain a great deal of exposure from content sites
redistributing their articles. The backlinks are invaluable.
However, if these sites start to contain duplicate articles
with different titles, I will simply be forced to collect
articles from the largest article directories. So much for
diversification… lets all encourage monopolies!
The same would be especially true for RSS feeds.
~ Automated Submission ~
Technology is now helping authors distribute their articles
across the internet. The market for such tools is highly
competitive, thus there is a race to implement improved
features. One such feature now being implemented is the
rotation of article titles. This is intended to help an
author make every article published to article directories
unique.
Whilst I commend the authors for their ingenuity in finding
solutions, I am deeply concerned that this will initially
reduce the use of articles submitted, and eventually
discourage content site creators from sourcing articles from
multiple locations, and opting to source only from the
largest directories.
~ Think About Time ~
Writing 20 unique titles for articles will probably take as
much time as writing a whole new article. Two articles in my
opinion are certainly better to promote your business, both
short term and long term, than one article with 20 different
titles.
When it comes to monitoring the success of your article
publishing efforts, one of the favorite techniques is to
search for your article title, thus discovering which sites
used your article, and allowing you to also determine how
many of those same sites also include a backlink to your
website.
~ Advice to Authors ~
Based on my experience both as an author and a creator of
niche focused content sites, think very carefully before
leaping on the bandwagon of the newest trend in article
publishing. If you rotate your article titles, you are
making life harder for content publishers, and your efforts
might well backfire.
Andy Beard has worked in Sales, Marketing and Localization
for the last 15 years, primarily in the computer games
industry. He now spends his time creating content
sites(niche marketing), and writing about the techniques he
uses. He publishes his articles with the services of Article
Marketer
Article Directory: EzineArticles ezinearticles.com