SCBFG — SEO Challenge — Article Marketing — Duplicate Content

Ok so I believe that I am proving more and more that Google does not care about duplicate content at least not like many will have you believe. Check out this video from Google itself confirming that they understand that there will be duplicate content and you will not be penalized for any duplicate content.

They do say that you need to add value. Like a news site that pulls together articles to provide an easy user friendly format and access your blogs and websites can provide value by gather the best of your niche and providing it in a central location for your users.  Of course the news site general has their own original articles as well.  Also, you can provide your users a big favor of not having to search and search for the rich content that they are looking for.

Of course this just one way to run your site and you will still need to provide some original content as well. You need to contribute as well. Collecting the articles and information does provide value. However, you need to provide more than that. For example I hope this blog is going to provide my readers with information that will help them with their websites. I am sharing my experience so that they can learn from my mistakes and my successes. I am also providing some other articles and useful information from other authors.

I hope to be able to gather all that I am learning and be able to create a free e-book. I have already learned a lot so far and I will start to share more and more as time goes on.  One thing I have learned is that article marketing does work.  However, not exactly like everyone would lead you to believe.

From what I am seeing so far and I will verify this is that Google likes fresh new content and it does value the high rank sites.  For example my article that was placed on Digg went to page 8 on a fairly completive term SEO Challenge.   It did so as it was fresh and on a site that Google gives a lot of weight to.  However, today the same article is on page 10 as it is not as fresh and no one else has dugg it or linked to it so it is not as highly regarded.  However, my website is still on page 40 for this term.  It did not drop like the link to the digg article.  My website has added new content yesterday and today.  Thus it is still fresh and more relevant so it did not slip like the digg article did.

Some would say you can manipulate Google.  I would say they are wrong.  If you are constantly creating fresh content you will get ranked higher and higher.  You are not manipulating Google but doing what they would like you to do.  Now this fresh content needs to add value.  If it is just content with no substance it might help temporarily, but like the digg article it will get found out and it will drop just as fast as it rose unless it is sustained by more evidence that it is relevant.  This means actual traffic going to the site and more and more links being created.

Now some will say article marketing will create thousands of backlinks.  I cannot say that they are wrong, but it will not be an overnight thing.  From what I see right now article marketing is great for getting some initial traffic to your blog or website.