Avoiding the dulicate content penalty

An increasingly popular way to get exposure for your book is by syndicating articles through online article banks. One of the most popular, EzineArticles.com, has more than 40,000 participating authors. Contributors aren’t paid, but they figure the added exposure is worth the effort of article syndication.

If your articles are accepted, they’re featured on EzineArticles.com and made available for reuse on other Web sites, blogs and e-mail newsletters. Each article includes a “resource box” with links back to your site. Here's an example, look for the resource box at the bottom.

Although article syndication can provide great exposure, be selective about the content you contribute. Don’t offer any content that appears on your site without first rewriting it. Search engines such as Google constantly filter out “duplicate content” from search results. If an article from your site appears elsewhere on the Internet, one of the Web pages probably will be deleted from search results, and chances are it will be yours. Search-engine experts call this the duplicate content penalty.

How duplicate content backfires

Let’s imagine you’ve written a book about pottery, and to promote it, you publish a pottery blog. Last year on your blog, you wrote a nifty tutorial on fixing broken pottery. Word has gotten around, and now every pottery site on the Internet links to your pottery-repair page. Because of all these links, your page is the top Google result for “repairing pottery,” “fixing pottery,” and several related queries. That single page is your Web site’s crown jewel, accounting for half your new visitors and a good portion of your book sales.

Now let’s imagine you try to squeeze even more traffic from your pottery-repair article. You post it to EzineArticles.com, without changing much except to add the links back to your site. Meanwhile, you upload the same article to other syndication sites like GoArticles.com and IdeaMarketers.com.

Now you sit back and wait for the extra traffic, but the exact opposite happens—you see less traffic, not more. Now that your article appears on a bigger, more popular site, it’s likely that Google will send searchers there instead of sending them to your site. Google has made a quick calculation of which site is more authoritative, and because EzineArticles.com has more links than your site, it wins. Google doesn’t care that you wrote the article and have the Internet’s best pottery site.

The lesson is, keep your most valuable content on your site exclusively. And if you’re going to syndicate existing content, rewrite it substantially so the search engines don’t penalize you for it.

Google’s Adam Lasnik, the company’s “search evangelist,” offers two tips for avoiding the duplicate content penalty:

• If you syndicate an article containing the same or very similar language that appears somewhere on your site, ensure the syndicated article includes a link back to the original article on your site. Don’t include only a link to your home page or some other page.

• Minimize boilerplate language on all your content. For example, instead of including lengthy copyright notices at the bottom of all your Web pages, include a brief summary with a link to a page containing your full copyright notice.

None of these safeguards, however, are foolproof. The only sure way to avoid the duplicate content penalty is by syndicating original material only, and keeping your best material exclusive to your site.

BlogBurst could provide breakthrough for book bloggers

Thousands of book authors have already discovered the publicity power of content syndication through article-submission sites such as EzineArtlices.com. This week a new model for content syndication debuts, and could revolutionize the way blogs and author Web sites are exposed to the broader public.

BlogBurst went live on May 2, and you can see some of its first content being carried by major U.S. newspapers. See the San Francisco Chronicle's travel section -- about halfway down this page is the box Travel Blog Posts.

If it performs as its founders hope, BlogBurst may become the Web's first blog-based wire service for blogs, as the Baltimore Sun called it. It will provide blog content the same way the Associated Press provides material today for newspaper pages and Web sites.

Just imagine the traffic rush at your book blog if your posts were carried on the New York Times Book Review site and other relevant content sites.

BlogBurst has about 700 bloggers signed up, and it appears they've been well screened. The content is well written and the sites have a professional appearance. No spam here.

In addition to the Chronicle, a number of big newspaper companies have already agreed to begin using the content, including Gannett, the Houston Chronicle the Austin American-Statesman, and The Washington Post. If the idea works with them you can expect more papers to sign up with BlogBurst in a hurry.

A number of newspapers Web sites have launched their own blogs as a way to attract new readership and make their Web sites more compelling. What BlogBurst brings to the table is a more diverse array of talent and the possibility of an endless menu of niche content -- the kind newspapers could never afford if they had to pay for it. If the blog content proves popular with newspaper readers, it could make their Web sites a lot more sticky.

BlogBurst will sell advertising and split is with the newspapers and bloggers, though the precise details haven't been made public.

Here's an ABC News video on BlogBurst.