Comments on: Duplicate Posting and Free Articles = Duplicate Content

By: Nita

Nita — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:11:56 +0000

I duplicated just a few posts of mine but even then I used to get this uneasy feeling. Just my instinct telling me that it wasn’t right. Well, I searched the web and found this post. Luckily, before any damage was done. Thanks.

By: Darren

Darren — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 11:00:03 +0000

Yep they are the ones Kevin.

I’m slowly getting around to delete them all as I rediscover them.

By: Kevin D. Hendricks

Kevin D. Hendricks — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 20:40:57 +0000

Are the “free” articles you refer to the ones showing up in the older archives on this site, the stuff not written by you? Aside from any search engine issues, I’d say those articles just plain suck. Their quality is a big drop from the stuff you write, and there’s just no personality to them. As I’ve been reading through your archives as soon as I come to one of these articles I can tell right away–and I get downright bored. They’re usually general and not as specific as your posts, and they have no personality. I’d recommend staying away from them. If someone comes to your site and reads that stuff, I wouldn’t expect them to stick around. The rest of your content has a much better chance of keeping them on your site.

By: Rick Blythe

Rick Blythe — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:50:33 +0000

Thanks very much Darren. You are so right about the temptation to publish free articles. I feel like you wrote this for me. I have some cleanup to do now….

By: Victor

Victor — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 11:19:37 +0000

Darren I wish I’d read this article a year ago. I had a blog back then that was earning $100+ per day and increasing every month. Unfortunately I increasingly began to use these free articles that you talk about in your article here. I saw them as a free way to easily build up my blog. One day my traffic from Google almost completely disappeared and has never returned. My daily income dropped to less than the loose change I have in my pocket.

I wrote to Google and got the normal standard automatic responses that they send to everyone but I persisted in writing to them and eventually got a personal email back from someone who had looked into my case. She said that the reason I had suffered so much was for duplicated content. I did some digging around and found that some of the articles that I had been posting appeared in up to 100 other places on the internet. From what I understand, they penalise the rank of any pages they find to be copies of an original page. So they try to find the first page to put the information up but penalise any others that go up afterwards.

I’ve since deleted these articles but my site has never recovered the page ranking it once had, although it has improved a little. My experience echoes what you are writing here and I would encourage others to take heed of what is written above. You might get some short term gain from such articles but it may not last and you may lose everything you are working for.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:03:56 +0000

Duplicate writen content does not get you banned. This is a Google Myth. You are taking what Google says out of context. They are talking about completely identical pages. Not just words on pages.

Many sites share the same press releases and use aggregated news services like Reuters & APP. No problems…

Use “free articles” and benefit from more content. :)

By: Duncan

Duncan — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 07:41:06 +0000

I never duplicate but I do allow the occasional post to be republished on another blog on a different topic, I find that it opens my content up to a new audience and drives extra traffic to the main site, but some good points on the Google aspect though.

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 04:24:25 +0000

I think Google is pretty generous about duplicate content, really. The worst they’ll do is give all of the pagerank to one of the “duplicate” pages at the expense of the others. I don’t think anyone’s been banned due to duplicate content.

That said, I try to avoid it entirely. I generally do just what Darren said above: post a detailed article at the most appropriate site, then a summary and link at the other site(s). This avoids duplication and also helps to cross-pollinate traffic between the sites, always a good thing.

By: Tom Hanna

Tom Hanna — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 03:22:32 +0000

I’m relatively new to blogging, but have been running websites for quite a while and I know that it’s sometimes worthwhile to use free content for stickiness and repeat visit purposes. (Granted, it’s a shortcut to the harder work of producing it yourself, which is my personal preferred approach.) To avoid the search engine issues, it might be worth the trouble of hosting that content outside the main blog pages and using a robots.txt file to keep that duplicate content from being indexed. (I’m wondering if using the rel=nofollow tag would also serve this purpose.) Another option might be to use the free articles as email autoresponders. I suppose if you really wanted to insulate yourself, you could host the potential duplicate content on a separate domain name that you also control.

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 02:56:53 +0000

I think a way around the duplicate content thing with duplicate postings is to write one post that you put on the most appropriate blog and then you link to it (perhaps with a quote or a paraphrase) from another/others. That way you’re exposing your message to more than one audience but not duplicating. Its also good for SEO this way.

By: Jeremy C. Wright

Jeremy C. Wright — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 02:38:36 +0000

I only cross-post when one of my readers asks why I haven’t talked about something on a specific blog, and I realize I blogged about it elsewhere and obviously a certain portion of my audience didn’t get that.

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 02:10:30 +0000

Just a though. �press releases� are widely distributed and cross posted across the web. Google has some lead way if you don�t push it.