Article Marketing – A Duplicate Content Experiment
Article Marketing is a hot SEO button right now. It is without a doubt one of the most effective search engine marketing strategies, but there seems to be some disagreements on what the most effective techniques are. Some argue that because of duplicate content filters, you have to create lots of variations of your articles. Some argue that publishing the same article across lots of websites still generates the links you need even if the pages don’t rank well in search results.
First, let’s look at the technique of using different versions. This can be a very time consuming process to create multiple versions of an article, especially if you intend to keep the quality intact. According to this approach, each article submitted would need to be at least 70{899b15f80a2d8718204d48354149b0a45e47eff631d37dac5896e2c8e1eedb93} unique from the other articles submitted, which means you need to change 70{899b15f80a2d8718204d48354149b0a45e47eff631d37dac5896e2c8e1eedb93} of the content or wording. This 70{899b15f80a2d8718204d48354149b0a45e47eff631d37dac5896e2c8e1eedb93} threshold brought the rise of new technology called “article spinners.” These programs take an article and “spin” it up to several hundred times, and submit the article to hundred of different sites as “original” content. The problem with this approach is the poor quality of the “unique” articles. The software changes the articles by using synonyms for about 70{899b15f80a2d8718204d48354149b0a45e47eff631d37dac5896e2c8e1eedb93} of the words. You can imagine how strange some of the articles will sound. Using synonyms is a way to “circumvent the duplicate content filter” but it will inevitable lower the quality of the content on the web because the automatically generated content will 1) never be edited by an individual and 2) will not read correctly for end users. Hopefully, for higher quality websites where articles are human edited, the “spun” articles will not get approved. This alone will lower the effect of using an article spinner.
It is another completely different thing to update your existing articles with new content or to do a few articles covering different aspects of the same topic. This is more time consuming, but end users can appreciate a second or third edition of an article if it provides new insight and information. Even a related article is beneficial, especially if related articles are linked together to form a series or an e-book.
The second technique is to submit one quality article to many different websites. Using this approach seems like the better of the two options. In a case study, a single article was submitted to several hundred sites including social media sites, bookmarks, article directories and online magazines. When you search for the title of the article, over 700 results showed up, almost all of which were on websites we submitted it to, and some where added from third parties who liked the content. The content was a higher quality article providing insight on a subject matter, and was distributed to a lot of sources. Because of its quality, it appears that it was not filtered by a duplicate content filter.
Of the two techniques, there will still be ongoing debate. It is however important to remember a few things regardless of how you market your articles and content. First, write content that people will want to read and not for the search engines. Second, publish the article on your own website and get credit as the original source. Third, use the web to promote your insight. The end result will be a far more effective marketing campaign.
