Posts Tagged ‘Articles’

Is Rewriting Your Own Articles Ethical?

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

The question has come up several times in the past few days due to my last posting which discussed a tool for helping you to create multiple unique versions of a single article. Is rewriting and publishing your own articles ethical?

I talked a little about the ethics of this particular article factory tool in that thread, and ultimately I really believe it comes down to each individual’s perspective for themselves.

However, I also think it only fair to again point out that the tool I discussed does not create or add words to your own writings on its own. The machine is not writing the articles in this case. The user is creating every word, jot and tilde being put out in the multiple versions, so it is really no different than the user sitting down and manually writing multiple versions of their own article, it’s just faster.

And after some of the discussions I’ve been having with others on the subject recently I think it’s also only right to examine why exactly such a tool even has a purpose. In other words, if there wasn’t a need for publishers to have multiple versions of the same content then maybe they wouldn’t create them, manually or through automated tools.

You see, as I view it the publishers aren’t the problem here. Not even marketers who are shooting for sales.

The problem begins with the search engines, specifically the “how and why” of their index results ranking systems.

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you search Google for “declaration of independence” (without quotations) and check out the first result displayed (I’ve linked to what it was at the time of this writing since rankings do change regularly) you will see that nowhere on that page is there a readable version of the Declaration of Independence. What’s up with that?

The top result is relevant to the term, I’m not disputing that. And it even links to a text version of the right document, but that’s an added step for the user who was most likely expecting to find a copy of the text when they made their search, yet it didn’t appear in the top result… why?

Because the ways that Google and other search engines rank what’s the most relevant or important content for any given search term are severely lacking.

That isn’t to suggest they aren’t doing the best they can, I think they probably are, but there are limitations on just what can be done and on how intuitive an algorithm can be designed; not to mention that there is after all, only 1 top spot for any given term.

And that’s where the breakdown between search engines and publishers occurs. Search engines want to serve the best results to their users, and publishers who feel their content is the best result for a given search term want to have their page served first.

Unfortunately, because the methods being used by search engines to determine “the best” or most relevant content have flaws; publishers are forced to take additional steps beyond just creating great content if they want their pages to appear first. They have to also wear the hat of promoter for their content.

Publishers have to publish great content, AND then apply some strategy to that published content for assisting it in climbing the ranking systems of search engines. Which might explain why I didn’t find a text version of the Declaration of Independence in the #1 spot on Google… since Jefferson isn’t around to do any link building for his document.

If he were then surely the 2nd result from Google (at the time of this writing) would have been propelled up to #1 with just a tiny effort. Heck, if Jefferson had just had a Delicious or Digg account to bookmark the second result from it probably would have jumped up to the top spot easily.

Of course the flip side to publishers trying to promote and aid their works in ranking better is that the search engines are at the same time trying to prevent them from aiding their works to rank better. Because the search engines, despite the flaws in their systems, don’t want outside interference or “manipulations” being applied–which is completely understandable on their part.

It isn’t that they don’t want the best material reaching the top, they simply don’t want individual publishers each determining what is or isn’t the “best” material.

The whole thing is an ugly catch-22 where publishers and search engines act like opposing candidates in a heated election race. They shake hands and smile warmly to one another for pictures, but deep down neither trusts or likes the other very much.

And this all brings us to the real reason of why a publisher would need (not want) to create multiple versions of the same basic content.

As a publisher and having been online since the early 90’s I know of a lot of ways to help a piece of content rise in the search rankings. But, most of them are dubious at best, and some are down-right nasty; so I tend not to use them in my business model.

On the other hand, there is something publishers can do to improve their chances for reaching searchers looking for a specific topic (by keyword term) that isn’t nasty at all, and doesn’t seem very dubious either. Instead of trying to “game” the search rankings they can try to saturate them.

As long as each piece of content is topical, relevant and somewhat unique it’s possible for a publisher to reach more searchers in this way. So, by creating multiple versions of the same core content publishers gives themselves a wider and longer “reach” among searchers for their topic.

That doesn’t mean publishers want to waste their time rewriting the same thing over and over, and it certainly isn’t helpful for the search engines who are trying to “get it right” for their users… it’s simply an effective method for publishers who believe searchers for a specific term and their content should be connected.

I’m sure some puritans will say that rewriting and creating multiple versions of the same thing is spammy, but I think that’s a silly argument. It’s like saying that Ford should only be allowed to run the commercial for their latest car model 1 single time only.

A better argument against creating multiple versions of the same content, and the one I stand behind, is that it doesn’t actually benefit anyone in the end. Publishers waste their resources creating it. Search engines waste their resources filtering and indexing it, and the end user searcher only needs to find a single version of it to be happy. The entire dance, regardless of being effective for connecting content consumers with material, is horribly inefficient for everyone.

Still, publishers, whether commercially motivated or not, are just trying to reach people to consume their content. Just as Ford is trying to reach the most people possible with their commercials. And just as Ford will purchase as many runs for their commercial as they can budget for, content publishers can and will place their content in as many venues for exposure as they possibly can as long as that’s what it takes to make those consumer to content connections.

Publishers aren’t intentionally trying to overload networks or platforms with multiple versions of the same content with any malice. Trust me, as a publisher I’d like nothing more than to spend all of my time creating truly new content.

But unfortunately, everyone must live and work within the rules and parameters of their environment, and as long as there are flaws which prevent the perfect match of search index results to search term publishers are going to need to continue playing the duel role of promoter for their work and using whatever methods that exist and are effective for helping them reach the largest audience.

And tools, like the one I spoke of in my last posting, which don’t change the process but do speed it up and save publishers a little time in their promotional work will continue to have a purpose.


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Strengthen the Primary Site

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

This is part 6 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.

While everything this posting covers is equally vital to every other step in the niche network building process, you should already have a fair understanding of how to achieve everything I lay out below so I’m not going to waste your time repeating a lot of the details and instructions I’ve covered previously.

The whole point to this step is to strengthen your primary site and place it in a position to establish itself online as dominate in your niche. What follows is the beginning of that process.

Start creating additional pages for your primary site. Each page should focus on a single keyword term from your “On Site” keyword list. Your keyword should be included in the page title and URL ( for example: www.mysite.com/new-page-keyword.html ).

The content of your new page should have between a 4% and 8% keyword density. Do NOT force your keyword into the content, but pay attention to it while writing your page content to use it naturally and try to get within that 4% to 8% margin.

For each new page you create use 4 keywords from your “Off Site” keyword list and create 4 articles–1 from each keyword. Remember to use your new page keyword in the article Resource Box link and submit your articles (1 each) to the directories you submitted your previous articles to.

Submit your new page and each of the published article pages across the social networks you’ve been active in where the content is relevant. Remember, you have to be active in the social community to gain any real benefits from submitting to it, and your content has to be relevant to avoid being considered spammy by community members.

Be sure to link to your new content pages from your main site page, and with each new page you create rebuild your XML and text based sitemap files using GSiteCrawler.

You Do NOT Have to Resubmit Your Sitemaps! In-fact, there’s some evidence that suggests resubmitting them to Google can have a negative effect for you. But you should update them as you add new content to your site and let the search engine bots find the updated sitemaps on their own.

There’s no limit to the number of new pages you can or should create. From this point forward creating new primary site pages should become an ongoing part of your work schedule. I like to try to add 1 new page per day, 4 days per week–you should find a routine that works for you. Sticking with it is the most important part. If you decide to build 5 new pages every week, great, but make sure you do it. Losing focus is the worst thing you can do at this point.

Just follow the points from this step for each new page you build and you should soon begin to see your inner (new) site pages climbing up the SERPs for their respective keywords. And from that you’re actually helping to strengthen your main site page for your primary keyword as well, since these new pages should all be linking to your home page with your primary keyword in the anchor text.

Here’s a little secret that I’ve learned over the years; search engines credit backlinks from pages on the same web site. It’s true, though it’s not really a secret–more like an overlooked resource most of the time. So, now you’ve got all these new pages being supported and propped up to the search engines by backlinks from the social networks and article directories you’ve been using and submitting content to… and these new pages are all relevant to your main site topic, and supporting your main page by linking back to it. See how it all comes together and works? You’re building up your own site dominance from within, of course also with a little help from those networks and directories where you’ve become a respected contributor and participant. It’s all very natural, ethical and strategic.

Part 7 of the series should be available in a day or two so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.


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Marketing Launch

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

This is part 5 of 10 in the Niche Network Marketing with LAMP series.

A short preface is in order for this installment. Under optimal conditions you will have at-least a small budget on hand to enhance your marketing efforts via paid advertisements (links, banners and etc. on related sites) and/or Pay Per Click campaigns. These methods aren’t essential in the long term, but will provide you with a faster start.

However, I’m trying to provide this series on Niche Network Marketing in a manner that anyone should be able to do–and afford–so what follows are the free steps I take in marketing a new Niche Network as I’m developing it. Please read them with the understanding that it’s best–though not crucial–to be able to compliment them with some of the paid options I’ve mentioned above for maximum initial impact.

First, prior to anything else in this step, you’ll need to ensure you have two sitemaps ready for your site. Some blogging and other CMS software have sitemap options pre-installed. These are good, but even they usually only provide a single XML (Google preferred) sitemap file. What you want are an XML and a pure text URL list (Yahoo preferred). Yahoo seems to be able to pick up your pages from an XML sitemap, so this may seem like overkill, but in my own non-scientific testing it seems as though Yahoo picks up pages faster if you provide the pure text URL list sitemap with the XML one, so I strongly suggest creating and keeping both.

There’s a nice, free tool available that automates the whole sitemap process, and will create both the XML and text based files for you. It’s called GSiteCrawler and you can find it at http://gsitecrawler.com

Once you have both files, just upload them to your primary niche site and be sure to link to them on your main site page. You can then go to Google and Yahoo and submit your sitemaps. At Google only submit your XML sitemap file. In Yahoo you can submit both the XML and the text based files.

Now it’s time to get into some dirty work. You’re going to need to create (or pay someone to create) 8 thorough, well written and useful (to readers) articles around your primary niche topic.

These can not be fluff!

They must be as informative, entertaining and engaging as you can possibly make them.

They must also be well crafted!

You’re going to create each article using 2 of your keyword phrases. In each case, the article itself should be focused around one of your “Off Site” keywords. These are the highest competition keywords you have researched earlier. The article title should contain the keyword, it should also appear in both your opening and closing paragraphs of the article; and if you can use it at-least once more in the body content of your article that’s great too. Just be sure that it fits into each use naturally. You CAN NOT keyword stuff in these articles (and you really shouldn’t do it anywhere else either) or you’ll ruin the foundation of your whole network. Trust me.

When you have the article completed you’re going to select a keyword from your “Longtails” keyword list (I’m assuming you created the 3 keyword lists as described in part 2) that will be the anchor text for the link in your Author’s Box when you submit the article to a publishing platform. The link itself should point to your primary niche site.

For best results, the anchor text keyword should seem naturally related to the high competition keyword you created your article around, so it’s actually a good idea to select both keywords before writing your article. This way you can find two that are closely related and that should help make everything more natural once published.

Repeat this process over and over until you have 8 perfect articles ready to publish. Notice that I emphasized the word perfect. That was to stress two points. The first is that you should approach every aspect of building a niche network with a goal of perfection. It’s hard work to get everything right, but by striving for perfection you will give yourself the best possible chance for success.

And second, to reiterate that these articles must be of high quality and value to readers. They can not be fluff or junk.

Once you have all 8 articles ready, you’ll want to submit 2 each to the following article directories: eZineArticles, GoArticles, SearchWarp and Content Caboodle.

NOTE: There are a lot of theories and debates over how to submit articles, whether they should be submitted to multiple directories and etc. I’m only going to say that I suggest you manually submit every article, and only submit each one once to a single directory. That’s why you create 8 articles, so that you have enough to submit 2 to each of the 4 directories I’ve mentioned.

In the interest of candor and full disclosure I am involved with the Content Caboodle web site and business. That’s not my motivation for including it here, but I think it’s only fair that readers be aware of my involvement there. I have 2 reasons for adding that site to the list of directories. First, I know that Google is showing it a lot of love since it went online and newly published articles are being indexed within hours every day. So this is great for building your SERPs and search engine traffic.

And second, because unlike any of the other article directories listed, Content Caboodle pays authors for submitting quality articles. Article directories make money from advertising to visitors. Content Caboodle does as well, however keeps the advertisements low-key (a single ad on each page). Still, understanding that the directory makes more money from more page views, and that quality articles always generate more readers (page views), Content Caboodle pays authors a flat-rate per page views their articles receive, so it’s beneficial to everyone–authors and the article directory–to have high quality content being created and submitted.

After you’ve submitted all 8 articles you’ll want to watch for when each gets accepted and published. GoArticles and SearchWarp publish instantly, however eZineArticles and Content Caboodle both go through a manual editor’s review for quality and email authors upon publishing.

As each article is published on a directory, you should then submit them to any relevant social communities that you can.

Do Not SPAM Social Networks!

I’m not advocating that you blindly submit your published articles to every social network out there. I’m saying that where the topic of your article is something that makes sense to submit to certain social networks then you should submit it to those networks only. You should be actively involved in the social networks you joined from part 4 of this series (if you’ve used them each daily as I mentioned), and should have a solid understanding of what topics will fit which networks by now.

It may seem odd that I’m telling you to essentially promote pages on another web site (the article directory’s page holding your article), but the point here is that you’re developing a web of linking and traffic flow for both humans and search engine bots to follow around, and everything about this web of linking is ultimately pointing back to your primary niche site in the center.

As just one example, lets say you create an article titled “Article A” and submit it to Content Caboodle. Once it’s published you then submit it to Digg. Now we can follow the trail that humans and bots will find:

The submitted listing appears on a Digg page, that links to the article page on Content Caboodle, which has a link in the Author’s Box to your primary niche site–and it’s all related! That’s important because it means the humans are interested (and likely have a growing interest with each step along the way) in your topic, and the bots just love related linking.

Maybe your niche is something technical, so there’s a submission on Digg in the “Technology News” section that links to this article on Content Caboodle in the “Computers and Technology” section, that then links back to your site which is in this technology niche.

That’s how it all starts to come together, and it happens with each social network that you submit each article to.

But again, and I really can’t stress this enough, it all only works if you create quality content and articles to begin with, and if you’re selective and careful in your social network submissions to only submit pages that will be relevant and interesting to the communities. Take any short cuts along the way and you’ll blow it.

Part 6 of the series should be available in a day or two so please check back, or better yet subscribe to my RSS newsfeed and be sure to get it as soon as it gets published.


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

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

writing

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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