Often they don’t understand yet just how content rules the web, and sometimes they wonder about the use of ‘duplicate content’ and SEO efforts.

We know that most of the publishers reusing articles from our directory are eZine and Newsletter publishers who see Content Caboodle as a valuable place to find additional content for their publications–and for them there’s never any concerns or questions about ‘duplicate content’–they just want good content on topics in their fields to provide to their subscribers.

But there’s a growing number of webmasters recognizing the value of repurposing articles too, so we thought this was a good time to talk about the uses and benefits of doing so.

For starters, providing additional quality information on topics related to your website will build trust and authority for you/your site with your visitors. Whatever field you’re in, there’s likely a treasure of great information available for use that you don’t have to spend your own time writing from scratch when you reuse an article from Content Caboodle.

These articles will provide you with additional pages of content to offer your site visitors on topics they care about, and often also gives you the chance to look at topics from different perspectives from your own, which your visitors will also appreciate as “one size fits all” never applies online.

By reusing other’s articles you’re giving additional value to your site visitors, which will encourage repeat visits, positive word of mouth advertising, and help you to solidify yourself and/or your site as an authority presence in your field.

Next, there are ways to reuse articles that are completely legitimate, within our Terms of Service, and that will provide you with SEO benefits without any need to worry over the dreaded (and widely misunderstood) ‘duplicate content’ issue.

Lets say that you want to create a page (or blog posting) on your site about “Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets”, because they’re related to the field your site covers. But there’s a small problem, because you aren’t an expert on Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets, what can you do?

You could spend hours or days researching the topic so that you can write expertly on it, but that’s a serious investment of time. Or, you could hire a freelance writer to write the piece for you, but for a quality piece that’s going to require a serious investment of money (and maybe time as well depending on how fast the writer you hire is). Or, you could find a quality article that covers Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets here on Content Caboodle, read it to ensure the quality of information is right for you and your visitors, and then build a web page around that article in a way that will make the new page your own, provide value to your visitors, gain SEO benefits and comply with our Terms of Service for reusing articles.

Here’s how that can be easily accomplished: After reading the article and deciding it’s a good fit for your site, you write a couple of leading paragraphs to summarize the article and add your own thoughts or opinions to it, then you follow those leading paragraphs with the full article and author’s resource box (as per our Terms of Service), then either end your page, or if you’re so inclined you can even add a couple of follow-up paragraphs to remark on the article and perhaps spawn some comment discussions (if you’re posting to a blog) with your readers.

By adding your own content before (and possibly after) the article on your page, you add value and provide plenty of unique content for SEO purposes, and by utilizing the article in full (including the author’s resource box) you comply with out Terms of Service for reusing content.

So you see, with a quick search on Content Caboodle and a couple of sentences of your own, you can build a full page covering nearly any topic for your site and visitors in a very short amount of time.

There are many more ways that a creative webmaster can legitimately reuse article content from our directory, add value to it and benefit from it, we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here to point you in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: content, free content, reuse articles

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.

Technorati Tags: duplicate content, publishing

While some publishers prefer to pick and choose which content they republish–and we’ve made doing that as easy as possible–most prefer to pull the content in an automated manner for simplicity and to save time.

We’ve also made that easy by providing access to articles in every category via individual RSS feeds.

These RSS feeds contain the full articles, so if your site was targeted towards the topic of “Advertising”, you could just go to our Advertising category page and in the upper right (just below the search box) you will find a link to the RSS feed for that category.

By using that link you could then have instant republishing access to every article we have on Advertising as soon as they’re posted.

Be sure to read our Publisher Terms of Service for additional information.

Technorati Tags: content, publisher, rss