Are you afraid of using free reprint articles for fear the search engines will ban your site or penalize you for duplicate content?
I see wahms propagating this myth. Here’s a great article by Joel Walsh that might make you feel better about using free reprint articles.
SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded
The “duplicate content penalty” myth is one of the biggest
obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace
reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize
a site if much of its content is also on other websites.
Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for
content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across
the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty
for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating
another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint
of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on
multiple sites.
Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO.
“Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for
violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can
mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search
results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search
engine’s index of web pages (”de-indexing” or “delisting”).
How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?
* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint
content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case
is the news wires such as Reuters (PR 
and the Associated
Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as
http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).
* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now
hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a
cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine
traffic.
* Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both
from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting
content on the site.
How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content
When I first started distributing content for my main site, I
was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors
clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine
traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from
having content on the site.
But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I
got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in
September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for
clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out
for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for
them to find all the reprint articles I had written.
I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles,
which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web
content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.
The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic.
The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long
multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the
article word for word.
Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?
1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link
popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to
the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to
category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three
clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over
100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since
these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly
doubt they got any links from other sites.
2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had
been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint
article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated
reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the
legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I
guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages
either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to
100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web
page to appear in search engine results for the search string.
Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?
You would think Google would just pick one web page with the
article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic
to it.
But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at
factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at
links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total.
Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not
all of them.
The whole experience has given me great insight into what
factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the
page itself, and the relative importance of each.
* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely
important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched
pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article
title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating
unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target
keywords.
* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a
unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off
with some keyword-laced comments.
* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for
links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are
also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage,
keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out
extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a
single page).
Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring,
cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the
“duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and
share the search engine wealth.
About The Author: Joel Walsh owns
UpMarket Content which has Joel’s articles available for
reprint, and also lets you order the complete website promotion
content package of content and distribution services
Tags: Uncategorized