Using Content From Article Directories
Posted by Editing StaffWith all of the various opinions online about duplicate content filters and other matters of SEO importance we wanted to comment on this briefly.
We know first-hand that articles from our directory are being republished on external sites, and those external site pages are being indexed and ranked by search engines in many instances.
Looking at some of the examples we know of where the articles did get indexed, and also some where articles didn’t get indexed, we’ve formed our own opinion on the duplicate content question. Please note, this is just our opinion, we have no special insights into the secret-workings of the search engines, our conclusions and opinions are only based upon the results we’ve witnessed.
When search engines read a web page they read the whole page, not just the body content but also all of the content residing in the header, sidebar(s) and footer of the page.
The majority of sites where we’ve seen republished articles seemingly get indexed fast and rank well have had lots of unique text content in those perimeter locations.
If you think about how a duplicate content filter might work, it would have to compare the text of 2 web pages to see if they are identical or close to identical.
So this all makes sense to us. If you have a good deal of unique text content in the header, sidebar(s) or footer of your site then when you publish an article on your page that page will contain the article plus your unique content, meaning it won’t be identical (or even close if you have lots of unique content) to any other web pages, so won’t suffer from any duplicate penalties.
Again, this is only our conclusions and opinions based upon the results we’ve seen.
Our point to posting this is because we believe it improves your web visitor’s experience when you can offer them additional information on your site topic(s), and our purpose behind Content Caboodle is to make good information on a wide range of topics available for publishers to use in that way.
However, we don’t want to see publishers being penalized by search engines just for trying to improve their visitor’s experience, so we hope this information will help you to expand on your use of repurposed content from directories while avoiding the risk of being penalized for your efforts.
