Is This the Truth & Nothing but The Truth?
A friend sent me the information below. I really would love YOUR comments & thoughts on this. Is this the absolute Truth? Am I the only one (embarrassingly), confused by this?
Please, leave your thoughts.
Meredith
"Article Marketers – Lay the Duplicate Content Myth To Rest Once and For All Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 6:31 pm"
Over and over, on all the popular Internet Marketing forums, especially the Warrior Forum, new article marketers pose the question: “if I post the same article in multiple article directories, will Google penalize me for duplicate content?” Or: “after posting an article to my blog or website, do I need to re-write or spin it before posting it to article directories?”
It’s really amazing how these two words duplicate content have become such a completely misunderstood concept. I think the entire confusion was perpetuated by opportunity seekers who sell services or software to spin articles After all, it’s hardly in their best interests to be seen to accept the real truth.
Just stop for a moment, forget all the myth and hype and think rationally. All the news services, for example Bloomberg, the Associated Press, Reuters, Scripps Howard, CNS etc., are in business for one reason: to distribute news in a pre-written format. These news feeds are picked up and published all over the internet by thousands of diverse subscribing web sites. They don’t employ people to re-write the content; it’s published exactly as they receive it, with a byline to the source.
Wikipedia describes Web Syndication thus: Web syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts). The term can also be used to describe other kinds of licensing website content so that other websites can use it.
This should be the mind-set of every professional Article Marketer. You should write high quality content, publish it first on their own blog, wait for it to be indexed by Google, then publish it, without any editing (other than adding a resource box), on EZine Articles and other article directories. By doing this, you will transcend the horde of ‘article directory marketers’, and move into the more elite class of Article Syndicators.
Following Google’s February algorithm update, known as the Panda, or Farmer update, aimed at identifying low quality sites and content, writers and syndicators of top quality material are reporting significant upturns. Google calls it a “high quality sites algorithm”, and it is causing the cream to rise to the top.
- Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
- Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
- Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.
- If somebody copies your content, you have the option of filing a DMCA report via Google. Also, you can take lawful actions if you think they're stealing or hurting your own company in some sort of way (logo copying, pretending to be you, and other serious things).
- In the case of structuring your website via syndicated articles, you can setup what's called boilerplate repetitions. Also in the case of using somebody similar URL's & html via web pages, you can use what's called canonicalization to notify Google Bots of this.
This would only apply to me (right now anyway) in case somebody else copied my content. In the rare case that actually did happen, I'd simply file a DMCA report & be done with it. If they took it to Social Marketing or something else more advanced, I kinda wouldn't care. Google on average makes up around 50% of your traffic. It should also be taken into consideration if your link is still on the copied article too.
The only time I'd seriously care if somebody else was branding themselves off me, pretending to be the company I run, or re-distributing products or pictures that I created. Then lawful actions would be taken against them.
If you bring information to your visitors that they didn't have before but can use, duplicate content is good... for them.
And that's whether you're using someone else's info or your own.
If you're giving them sillied (or is it sillyfied?) spun duplication, obviously, it doesn't benefit them... And, since the Panda update, it will not benefit you, either.
Unless, of course, Google is not as good at, or doesn't care as much as it says, about good content.
The problem Google has, some good content is good and bad at the same time... Because its definition of good is: relevant to the search and decent enough writing/content.
If you forget the duplicate content part and ask yourself, will the visitor benefit? and the answer is 'yes' you're ahead.
association with spamming the internet with hundreds, often thousands of spun, unreadable excuses masquerading as articles."
But you're right, you didn't lose in terms of ranking and getting the traffic that came from ranking.
Let's invite the programmers here to create a stealth bomb that gives articles a self-destruct function that activates as soon as the credits are removed.
Better yet, self-destructs in such a way as to take down nearby properties... say, all pages in the same category, or carrying the same tag.
