Want tons of content pages fast and in an ethical manner?

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For a long time people have been using other’s writings for content. I’m not talking about theft here, but rather the republishing of RSS content, articles from directories that have reprint rights attached and the likes. However, as search engines have become more aggressive in not giving weight (love) to sites using this type of content via what are referred to as duplicate content filters it has grown increasingly harder for webmasters to fill their site pages.

I’m not really going to touch on the moral or ethical questions over duplicate content too much. I tend to agree with the search engine positions for the most part, that republishing content just for the sake of “fluffing” up your web site page totals ultimately isn’t good for the end users and shouldn’t be rewarded in the SERPs.

That said, there are times and places where republishing other’s writings is absolutely ethical and warranted–and if done correctly shouldn’t cost the republishing site(s) any loss of favor among search engines.

Here’s one example. Lets say you have a site about Dye-Sublimation Heat Transfer Printing and you want to create a content page on a specific new model of Heat Press machines but haven’t actually used that model yourself, what can you do? Well, you could find what others have written and then just rewrite their opinions. That would give you original content in the search engine eyes, however it isn’t really original since you’ve just rewritten other’s works and it isn’t very ethical to do that.

Another option would be to pay someone to write the content for you. Again this leads to original content for you and is (if you hire the right person) going to be purely original and not a copy of other’s work. But, it can be costly to do if you want to build a lot of pages.

Or another option–and this is where an ethical use of republishing comes in–would be to collect 2 or more articles on the Heat Press model that have already been written by others and are available with reprint rights, place them all on your content page and then write an original and thorough summary introduction which clearly states that the following information has been collected (with permissions) from various sources in order to offer the reader a broad range of details and opinions on this new Heat Press model.

Make sure that your summary encompasses and explains what the reader will find in each individual article that follows, and what your thoughts on each article are. The goal isn’t to review each article you’re republishing further down the page, but to just summarize each one separately so that the reader can decide which one (or all) they think will best serve them to read.

In doing this you achieve several positive things with your page for yourself, the search engine bots and most importantly for your readers: The summary introduction is going to be at-least several paragraphs of original content at the beginning of the page, and that makes those search engine bots smile. By making the bots happy your pages will be more likely to get indexed and rank among the search engines (and not be ignored for the use of duplicate content), and you’ll not only be giving your readers relevant information on the topic, but choices of sources for the information that are well summarized to allow them to quickly get what they want or need from your page.

I know there are some who take a hard-line approach that any republishing of content is bad. I disagree with that to the extent that I think having 100 people all writing the same information–even in their own unique ways and writing voices–is equally congestive, not to mention the wasted time and energy of all those people testing and writing about the same thing. So, in my opinion when several sources already exist and can be used in a manner that doesn’t just collect and regurgitate, but actually adds something of value for the reader in presentation–as the summary introduction I’ve described does–I believe it is an ethical and correct application of reprint rights.

Still, if you’re absolutely against (or afraid of) republishing article content, this same method can still be used with a slight twist to build your site content pages. Simply find several articles on the subject that already exist, write extensive summary reviews of each article and instead of having the actual articles republished on your page, link to them as the original sources. Basically, you’re reviewing the individual articles for your readers and offering them the opportunity to read the original materials if they want. An important thing to remember is that in doing this you must write an actual review of each article and not just copy-n-paste from it and call that your summary. That’s unethical and will still be considered duplicate content, however an honest review in your own words of the author’s piece that includes a link to the original article is perfectly acceptable.

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