How To Use EzineArticles And Not Get Penalized For Duplicate Content?
Ok, so the thrilling idea of being able to make money online with a blog while having to do absolutely ZERO writing appeals to many people. But also too, the threat of getting penalized in Google for publishing duplicate content seems scary too. So what do you do? Seems like a catch 22, huh?
Well, there are ways around this issue. For one, we need to understand more about duplicate content and what Google considers duplicate content to be. Secondly, we need to determine if there is a threshold or a limit to what Google deems as an acceptable amount of content.
While I don’t have these answers I can say this. No matter what you do, if you syndicate other content published on other sites, I believe that you indeed put yourself at risk. So with that said, in this article I DO NOT have a solution for you on how to successfully use EzineArticles.
If you chose to syndicate already published content on your web site you do yourself at risk with Google. However, what I can do is show you a few tricks that GREATLY reduce your risk and will deliver some amazing results. Sound good? Great! Let’s continue on….
First, let’s glace over at Matt Cutt’s blog and see what he has to say about duplicate content.
… I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content …
and…
Avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content.
Hmm… well, with that statement, it seems that EzineArticles indeed covers their ass, leaving the people who syndicate their content to pay the price:
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box in tact (means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted publisher terms of service.
and…
Agree to include the article source credit below each article reprinted with the link active: Article Source: EzineArticles.com. Agree to not include the rel=nofollow tag in your HREF statements.
Holy cow… so EzineArticles needs you to disclose that the content came from THEIR site so that THEY don’t get penalized for duplicate content and YOU do. Secondly, if that wasn’t good enough, YOU have to make sure that the links in the articles are DOFOLLOW. In my opinion, that puts your site into yet another infraction of Google TOS. You’d be better off publishing ReviewMe.com posts. At least you’d get paid for it.
Anyway, with the conditions set here and you’re up to speed. I am sure that you are still interested in running an automatic blog using nothing but content from places such as EzineArticles. Perhaps there could too be a balance between EzineArticles and your own… whatever. The point being, is that you’d probably be interested in doing this while also reducing your risks of getting slapped by Google. So, let’s continue….
Let’s look at this category page in EzineArticles:
http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Internet-Marketing
Now with EzineArticles, you can sort the listings by age. In doing so, you’ll see that this is one of the oldest in that category:
http://ezinearticles.com/?3-Powerful-Concepts-That-Climb-Marketing-Mountains&id=142
and this is one of the newest:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Generate-Leads-Using-Web-2.0—Building-on-a-Budget&id=1377823
Now, in my experience, I have learned that the older something is published online, the stronger the anchor the content has in the search engines. Secondly, and more importantly in the terms of dup content, the older an article sits in the Ezinearticle pool the higher chance that people have already syndicated the content.
The trick to using Ezinearticles is being the FIRST one to snag a copy of the newest article published. If you can do this, you can claim your authoritve ground on the content over anyone else that syndicates that content. With that said, you still have the risk of having EzineArticles over powering you. I can’t help you there… that is the risk you have to take.
However, if you choose only the NEW articles published and make sure that you are one of the first sites to get the content indexed in Google before anyone else, you should be fine. If fact, if you can get the new content indexed before EzineArticle does, that looks even better.
Here is the trick to discovering how “Tainted” an Ezinearticle is:
Let’s look at the above two referenced articles above. We have the oldest one and we have one of the newest.
What we need to do is see how many copies of these articles Google has in their index. To do that, we need to do an exact phrase search on snippets of the content found in each article.
Article #1: THE OLD ONE:
Snippet: “You have probably heard many times how you should offer free reports. Like many of us, the idea of putting in work to give something away”
Number of copies in Google: FOUR
Article #2: THE NEW ONE:
Snippet: “There are such a multitude of different ways to market in web 2.0 that your head will spin if you try to do them all at once.”
Number of copies in Google: ONE (which happens to be the author’s site and not Ezine)
The easiest way to see how many copies of an article Google has a record of is to visit the article and randonly select about 25 words from the article and do an exact phrase IN QUOTES search on it. When you do this, you will also start to see the power that Google has in their ability to index content. Also too, you can really start to see the power in longtail keyword search engine marketing… but that is a post I can do later in the future.
To reduce the risk of getting slapped with dup content, choose ONLY the articles that don’t have a lot of copies already found in Google. The best chance you have at doing this, is trolling Ezinearticles and sniffing around for the newest ones that get published.
To help you save time in doing this, Ezinearticles has an RSS feed. Simply subscribe to the category that best fits your needs and you will be notified when new content is published:
http://ezinearticles.com/rss/Internet-and-Businesses-Online-Internet-Marketing.xml
Hope you enjoyed the tip. Keep in mind, I am pretty old school and ultimately would recommend that you just buck up and write your own stuff instead of looking for that easy button to make money. Have fun and be creative and write your own content. People will enjoy it more.
Oh and one last tip regarding Ezinearticles… if you do decide to use their content, add to it. Meaning provide a LEAD IN paragraph saying,
“Here is a wonderful article that I read that will teach you how to fix your LCD laptop screen. I really enjoyed reading this article because the author, JOHN DOE, really takes his time with fully explaining the internal workings of a laptop LCD screen. Hope you enjoy reading this as much as I do.”
— PASTE EZINE ARTICLE —
“Thanks again for reading my blog and I hope that you enjoyed reading this. If you should have any comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave me a comment.”
Now if you’d invest the time into providing a mixture of ADDING to the content on your soon to be published page, that is great! That will help you very much in the long run.
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17 comments
Very solid info GC! I agree that I’d rather write my own stuff but… is there any concern for me submitting my content to their site in an effort to get links? When I submit an article there (I have submitted many), it is original and not previously published anywhere else on my sites or any others. No risk for me there right?
thanks!
AL
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Very nice Garry. I often wondered about this. I haven’t used a lot of these but I have done some of them in the past on some of my other blogs. I often try to write my own stuff or seek out people who will fill my head full of ideas for a post.Thanks for writing about this.
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Interesting, I can’t say I have ever used any article directories, but I guess for certain sites it may be cool. Say, on a niche website of some sort, that really isn’t a personal blog.
I don’t know, somebody is using these articles for the directories to be so popular.
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Having dofollow links is not against Google’s TOS. Having paid dofollow links for the purpose of passing PR is. Of course, there is always the problem of Google making wrong assumptions, but without the links I would think it would (or should in a better world) mark the article as improperly scrapped data.
The links in the articles are legitimate references to the source of the content. There should be no penalty. In fact, this would be more in line of giving proper and legal credit to the source.
I believe there is also a monthly limit to the number of articles used per domain so the idea of using Ezine content for a complete site may not be that plausible in the first place.
I have seen websites that have trashed the Ezine TOS with my own and articles written by others (including an extremely well known book author). The articles were laced with ads and affiliate links and the author boxes had the links removed with the website owner’s own author like box and links placed below it. Oddly, I found the site doing this because I was looking for an affiliate product to sell. Would you sell this jerk’s product?
There are some great uses and maybe better uses for Ezine articles besides content for a site. Newsletters and ebooks are a great way to use them and you would not need to fear Google in any way using them.
Your best bet is make your own content unique and submit some different content to the directories to gain backlinks.
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I write my own content. It takes a little longer, but I think then it has more staying power. If I do publish an article on both my site and an article directory, I wait until the original on my site is indexed.
It is better though to have seperate content in the article directories from your content. They really do provide good backlinks. Also, if you pick the right phrase you can infact have multiple listings on the first page in Google.
I’ve been putting Ariticle Post Rebot through its paces. I believe that is one of Mark’s favorite toolss.
LOL, why are you giving these people this advice? No wonder Cow beat that butt! Go over to my man at Vic at Blogger Unleashed, or check out Griz, you will see how to avoid the duplicate content filter when it comes to any kind of article including PLR’s.
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Great post Garry. I can see this being useful when flipping websites.
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You are so right on this stuff, as you said the best thing to do is write your own, but there are good articles from ezines that is pretty good. Thanks for the great tip.
So, in other words, if you are fast enough to grab the article, the search engines will see you as having the original article? Is it only me that sees something ethically wrong with this?
This kind of advice is exactly what is wrong with the internet today. Everyone is trying to get by with as little work as possible. Authors work hard and if they want to give their stuff to Ezine that’s their business. They are not working hard so that some scumbag can come by and claim to be the original source.
This is probably the poorest advice I’ve ever read. Shame on you
Steven
Thanks, this article clarified a couple of points for me. I’m curious what you think about article marketing and gaining backlinks that way to gain better rankings for your site. I have published some articles with links back to my site.
Does it look bad to have the same article all over the web with a backlink? Will that hurt my site?
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Good article, I have been reading about this in forums some, but no one has really discussed this side of it from what I have seen elsewhere. Thanks for the info.
Original content is always the best option however time can be an issue that prevents people from taking any action at all. If I am posting duplicate content I will alway change the title and the first 2 paragraphs (minimum) and sometimes add a paragraph. It still takes time but not as much as writing original content.
Thanks for the good article. I agree that writing your own material is by far the best way to fill a website. But there are a few instances where a new ‘voice’ on your site may be good. Maybe they have a unique way of explaining something that will help you rather than hurt you.
This is an a good tip. It does make sense not to use articles that has been beeb published a milion times. So the idea is just copy and paste a line or 2 from the articles and google it. Any copies should come up.
Other thing could be to use those articles without a linkback. Some authors write just for the fun of it, so why not use their articles, this way you dont have to use the their links.
Finally, some people only put 1 link rather that 2, its worth using them as well.
Please do post any useful tips in ezinearticles., will be following up these tips as I will che checking the notify me button for followups.
Thanks Garry, that’s quite helpful. Keep up the good work!
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