In the past couple of articles we have looked at the first steps to getting good content into your articles and outsourcing as a way of saving yourself some time in producing articles.
There are thousands of article sites on the web and each one that you post to will be a creditable back link to help your page to rate better with the relevant search engine. Here are some of the top sites according to their alexa ranking
EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com ArticleDashboard.com SearchWarp.com ArticlesBase.com iSnare.com * SelfGrowth.comAs you know, getting back links via this method is extremely important in your overall ranking process. Unfortunately we all know just how time consuming it is.
One expression that you will come across in relation to registering your articles is “Duplicate Content”
You will hear that posting the same article on many different sites will do great harm to your attempts to rank your site and will actually cause your site to perform badly with the search engines, especially Google, who will allegedly penalise your site.
Is this true?
Well, truly, no!
Google is not going to crawl your site, find duplicate content and reduce you by 200 places in the rankings because of it. Your site will not suddenly be removed from the rankings completely because “Shock Horror!!” the article you paced on ArticleDashboard is worded in an almost identical way to the one on EzineArticles.
The downside of producing duplicate content is that the duplicate article will quite probably not be recorded as a link by the search engines because of the duplication. It will be listed under the heading “pages similar to the ones shown have been omitted” and will therefore not drive any traffic to your site.
What this also means is that you have probably wasted quite a bit of time and effort in posting the duplicate content which could have been better spent doing more productive things.
Avoiding duplicate content
If you have produced an article on your site that you want to submit to an article site to help with back linking you want two things to happen.
- You want the article on your site to rate with the search engine for that content.
- You want the submitted article to return a backlink to you.
In order to achieve this you need to reword the article you are submitting so that it is significantly different to the one that you have on your own site. The search engine will then rate your site because of the article and also register the submitted article as a reference to your site. Isn’t that what you wanted in the first place?
How much rewording do you have to do?
In order to keep the search engines placated so that they do not ignore your articles it is suggested in many quarters that the minimum amount of rewriting is 20%. That is to say that at least 20% of the article must be different from the one to which it is being compared.
In my humble opinion this is not high enough. Why you may ask?
Well 20% is the recommended minimum, but what happens if someone at Google decides “Oh. Let’s change our algorithm because we can” and raises the bar to 25%? Suddenly all those articles that just passed the test will fail and your site could lose ranking faster than the titanic went down.
I would recommend you try for a 50% rewrite each time and protect yourself from these sudden changes.
How do you know if you have reworded enough?
There is a quite handy comparison tool at http://www.DuplicateContent.net. It offers two differing comparisons. The first is “Similarity of Text” which shows how similar the pages are from the text perspective and also advises on how much chanse there is of the contant being filtered out as duplicate by a search engine. The second part of the program compares the HTML of the compared pages.
If you do not have access to this type of program for some reason, there are other steps that you could take to avoid the ‘duplicate’ tag.
First make sure that the opening paragraph or two are totally different. The first 50-60 words are very important because they could be involved as a meta tag so adding an introduction to each article or changing them to read as different as possible will definitely help.
You could also add different images to help the process. One place to get free images would be at the Stock Exchange Website.
Are there other programs I can use that would help?
Yes there are! And I would like to introduce you to two of them that I highly recommend.
It is very time consuming to continually rewrite articles and then have to post them to article sites so if the project can be made easier and even partially or completely automated, that has to be of benefit.
However I should point out at this stage that neither of these programs is free.
What I can tell you is that they are very reliable, well supported and exceptionally effective in their separate areas.
These programs have been produced by people heavily involved in the IM and both have years of experience behind them
The first is Rapid Rewriter. In a nutshell, this is the fastest, most convenient way to ‘spin’ and rewrite 100s of variations of articles at speed.
The second is Article Marketing Automation. This program allows you to automate your article submissions whilst you get on with other more important things.
Just follow the links to find out more about these excellent programs.
I hope you have found this article informative and helpful and that you will continue to enjoy the quality information and products that we will continue to bring to you.
Gordon Christopher.
