Ezine Articles - using one of my own articles for my own content

22 replies
I realize now that I have made a mistake by publishing my articles on Ezinearticles first before putting them on my own site.

I won't make this mistake again.

So, now I want to take these articles and use them for my own content.

Do I just publish on my site them as I would any other article, using the same terms of service? Could I make a few changes to links or to the title if Ezine knows that's it's my own article?

Are there any issues I need to be concerned about? If an article is ranking well, maybe using it on my own site doesn't make sense, since there would be no advantage to possibly outranking it.
#articles #content #ezine
  • Profile picture of the author Alan Ashwood
    Originally Posted by CatherineMay View Post

    I realize now that I have made a mistake by publishing my articles on Ezinearticles first before putting them on my own site.

    I won't make this mistake again.

    So, now I want to take these articles and use them for my own content.

    Do I just publish on my site them as I would any other article, using the same terms of service? Could I make a few changes to links or to the title if Ezine knows that's it's my own article?

    Are there any issues I need to be concerned about? If an article is ranking well, maybe using it on my own site doesn't make sense, since there would be no advantage to possibly outranking it.
    Hmmm, that's a tricky one, and I think you've stumped me.
    My guess is that you shouldn't have a problem 'publishing' the articles on your own site. After all, they are your intellectual and original property. I doubt that you'll run into plagiarism problems either.

    But (and this is a bit of a guess too), I wouldn't change even a single word of the article when you psot to your site. It may be that once the post is indexed by the search engines, you can make changes.

    I'll be interested to see the official, professional answer to this. She should be along any time.

    Cheers
    Alan
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    Now where did I put that pencil?

    Time for a cuppa.
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    • Profile picture of the author WritingMadwoman
      Is your site ranked pretty well for its keywords? If so, it's still possible that placing the articles on your own site could make your site rank higher than your EZA pages.

      Another idea is to re-purpose the articles for similar keywords. Like if you had an article with the keyword "fat loss" you could rewrite it slightly to focus on the keyword "weight loss" and attract a different group of internet searchers.

      Even if you placed the exact same articles on your site that are on EZA, it's not going to hurt your site any. True, it's better to get them indexed on your own site first, but you didn't do it with those first articles, so not a big deal. They are still your articles and you can use them however you like even if you gave EZA first dibs on them.

      Wendy
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      • Profile picture of the author CatherineMay
        Originally Posted by WritingMadwoman View Post

        Is your site ranked pretty well for its keywords? If so, it's still possible that placing the articles on your own site could make your site rank higher than your EZA pages.

        Another idea is to re-purpose the articles for similar keywords. Like if you had an article with the keyword "fat loss" you could rewrite it slightly to focus on the keyword "weight loss" and attract a different group of internet searchers.

        Even if you placed the exact same articles on your site that are on EZA, it's not going to hurt your site any. True, it's better to get them indexed on your own site first, but you didn't do it with those first articles, so not a big deal. They are still your articles and you can use them however you like even if you gave EZA first dibs on them.

        Wendy

        Yes, Wendy, my site is ranked pretty well. The home page bounces between the 2nd and 3rd page of google. One of my "money" pages will hit the bottom of the 1st page, but I can't get it to stay there. Another one stays on the 2nd page. Other pages are all over the map. Thanks for pointing out my articles could help with the rankings; that's what's motivating me, but it's good to have someone else say so.

        As for you suggestion that I "re-purpose" the articles - this is basically the same concept as spinning, right? If I did that, would I need to still follow Ezine's terms of service? Wouldn't I need to change the anchor texts in links if I spun the articles?
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        • Profile picture of the author WritingMadwoman
          Catherine, sorry, I wasn't referring to spinning the articles, or even fully re-writing them, but rather just swapping out one keyword phrase for a related but different keyword phrase. With some articles you may have to rework them slightly to make them read better with the new keyword phrase, but not very much usually.

          I've used this process with PLR articles that target one set of keywords, and I've gotten that page of my site to rank highly for a different set of keywords that I swapped. So while a few hundred people are competing for top spots with that same article using the original keywords, I sneak mine in for a slightly different set of keywords - and chances are few people or none at all are using that same article for that exact set of keywords like I am.

          Rewriting the article isn't necessary, but you could do very minor changes if you wanted to make it unique from EZA's version.

          Wendy

          Originally Posted by CatherineMay View Post

          As for you suggestion that I "re-purpose" the articles - this is basically the same concept as spinning, right? If I did that, would I need to still follow Ezine's terms of service? Wouldn't I need to change the anchor texts in links if I spun the articles?
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          • Profile picture of the author CatherineMay
            Originally Posted by WritingMadwoman View Post

            Catherine, sorry, I wasn't referring to spinning the articles, or even fully re-writing them, but rather just swapping out one keyword phrase for a related but different keyword phrase. With some articles you may have to rework them slightly to make them read better with the new keyword phrase, but not very much usually.

            I've used this process with PLR articles that target one set of keywords, and I've gotten that page of my site to rank highly for a different set of keywords that I swapped. So while a few hundred people are competing for top spots with that same article using the original keywords, I sneak mine in for a slightly different set of keywords - and chances are few people or none at all are using that same article for that exact set of keywords like I am.

            Rewriting the article isn't necessary, but you could do very minor changes if you wanted to make it unique from EZA's version.

            Wendy
            Okay, Wendy, I understand what you are describing. My only remaining question is, if I use these articles already published on Ezines, then I'm obligated to make no changes, even if I'm the original author.

            Am I wrong on this?
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            • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
              Banned
              Originally Posted by CatherineMay View Post

              My only remaining question is, if I use these articles already published on Ezines, then I'm obligated to make no changes, even if I'm the original author.

              Am I wrong on this?
              I think this is wrong, yes.

              They're only your own rights on which you'd be "encroaching", and I can't see how, as the author, you could possibly be "wrong" to change your material, if you want to. I can't see how/why EZA would mind in the slightest, even if they knew. You've given them a publication-right only, not the copyright. It's still your article.

              It would be a bit weird if the principle that you can't take content from EZA and make changes to it applied to your own content, no?

              It would be a funny state of affairs, if you had an article on your computer which you'd written yourself, and then changed a few sentences before submitting it to EZA, and they published it, and then as a result of that you couldn't post the original version on your own blog?! :confused: :p

              My guess is that this won't specifically be covered anywhere (though you never know, with EZA, because so much is announced on their blog, rather than anywhere else, and if you don't happen to have seen it ... :rolleyes: ), and quite possibly even that they've never been asked this question before.

              I wouldn't dream of re-writing them, myself, for the reasons I offered above, but if you want to do that and make 100% certain it's ok, you can always ask Chris Knight.
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  • Profile picture of the author WebPen
    Duplicate content is a myth- it only hurts if you try to put it twice on one site.

    Just like "getting too many backlinks too fast" is a myth.... if it actually hurt your rankings, everyone would just Xrumer blast their competition into oblivion.

    So no, placing the article on your site first isn't a big deal. People do it all the time
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    • Profile picture of the author billhicks1982
      Originally Posted by AYoungMillionaire View Post

      Duplicate content is a myth- it only hurts if you try to put it twice on one site.

      Just like "getting too many backlinks too fast" is a myth.... if it actually hurt your rankings, everyone would just Xrumer blast their competition into oblivion.

      So no, placing the article on your site first isn't a big deal. People do it all the time
      So you can post articles on any article website even if they are on your site without writing new ones?
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
        Banned
        Originally Posted by billhicks1982 View Post

        So you can post articles on any article website even if they are on your site without writing new ones?
        No.

        Not "on any article website". (You're thinking of Squidoo, aren't you? Have just been reading your thread!).

        On any article directory, yes.

        Sites like Squidoo and HubPages are not article directories.

        As far as article directories go, you should always publish your articles on your own site first and have them indexed there, before submitting them to directories. All explained here in great detail.
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  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Originally Posted by CatherineMay View Post

    Are there any issues I need to be concerned about? If an article is ranking well, maybe using it on my own site doesn't make sense, since there would be no advantage to possibly outranking it.
    This part, I don't understand. Look at the typical EZA article page, even after the redesign.

    The only links that benefit you are the ones in your resource box. Every other link on that page benefits someone else.

    Presumably, the links on your own site will all benefit you.

    Why would you NOT want to outrank it?
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    • Profile picture of the author CatherineMay
      Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe View Post

      This part, I don't understand. Look at the typical EZA article page, even after the redesign.

      The only links that benefit you are the ones in your resource box. Every other link on that page benefits someone else.

      Presumably, the links on your own site will all benefit you.

      Why would you NOT want to outrank it?

      Right. Exactly. I've had more coffee now.
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
        Banned
        Originally Posted by CatherineMay View Post

        Right. Exactly. I've had more coffee now.
        This is, in fact, the answer to many of life's "article directory marketing dilemmas" ...
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      • Profile picture of the author CatherineMay
        Thanks so much, Alexa, for adding so much information and insight. As usual!

        Catherine
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Hi Catherine,

    It happens ... don't worry about it.

    There's no downside to your site by publishing them there now (just as you would have done originally). There won't be any great SEO benefit to it, but I realise you're not doing it for SEO but because they're your articles and you want them on your site for your visitors, and quite right, too. Your site's SEO won't be damaged, anyway. It's just that this time around, EZA got the benefit of the "initial indexation rights". That's no reason for you not to publish them, though.

    It's possible that Google will index the copies of these articles from your site only in the supplemental index (though even that isn't sure, because they're only on PR-0 pages at EZA anyway and your site might still "beat" them). And even if that does happen, it might well reverse in the future (even for these three articles) and one day you might suddenly find your site's copies in the index and EZA's copies in the supplemental index. But it's not a big deal, either way, for only 3 articles, anyway.

    What you're planning to do won't jeopardise the fate/SEO/indexing of any future articles, anyway.

    It's true you could avoid that happening by completely re-writing the articles, but I wouldn't bother, myself ... because the degree of "complete re-writing" you'd have to do, to be certain of getting a different indexing outcome, would be so high that you'd be better off just writing three new ones anyway.

    In other words, looking at it realistically, your options are to re-publish them or to ignore them, and since there's no cumulative or long-term downside you might as well re-publish them.

    All you'll really be doing, as far as these three articles are concerned, is putting your site in the exact position that a site belonging to anyone who syndicated them from EZA would be in. That doesn't do them any harm and it won't do you any harm.

    What a long-winded reply, sorry ... and all I've done is agreed with the replies above.

    There's a great advantage to outranking the EZA copies! Eventually that'll probably happen even to these articles, as your site gains in SEO. But in future, of course, publish and have indexed first on your own site.
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  • Profile picture of the author AnniePot
    Originally Posted by CatherineMay View Post

    Are there any issues I need to be concerned about? If an article is ranking well, maybe using it on my own site doesn't make sense, since there would be no advantage to possibly outranking it.
    Why on earth wouldn't you want an article published on your own website to outrank one published on EZA?

    Visitors the article published on your own website attracts are going to benefit you. Visitors to the version published on EZA, are, for the most part going to benefit EZA.

    Oh, I agree, a percentage of them may click your links and eventually arrive at your site, but that's a limited amount. Those who arrive at your site because your article published there has enticed them, are highly targeted. You don't need to get them to jump through hoops and click on the links in your resource box. They have already arrived.
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  • Profile picture of the author billhicks1982
    Ok, thanks, I am getting there

    Suppose I just lumped them all into one group, I need to understand difference between article website and article directory.

    So EZA is different to Squidoo? But on both you write an article, so trying to understand now
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Originally Posted by billhicks1982 View Post

      Ok, thanks, I am getting there

      Suppose I just lumped them all into one group, I need to understand difference between article website and article directory.

      So EZA is different to Squidoo? But on both you write an article, so trying to understand now
      If you look closer at Squidoo, their aim was to have people develop ongoing 'lenses', collections of content and links that explored a single topic. The aim and original intent was not to have people dump a single article on a lens, grab the link and move on.

      If you look at the origins of EZA, EzineArticles, you'll see that their original intent was not to be a dumping ground for people seeking backlinks. It was set up to be a collection of content available for syndication to other web properties (including pages like Squidoo lenses).

      As I view them, Squidoo is a way to connect with people interested in the lens topic and establish some trust and credibility through ongoing development of the lens. EZA is a means of identifying publishers interested in republishing my content, through the obvious mechanism of republishing the content posted to EZA. Once identified, I can try to deepen the relationship via offers of semi-exclusive or even exclusive content.

      The only time there's any confusion about using the two types of sites is when you start talking about publishing and distributing articles purely for the backlinks.
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    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      Originally Posted by billhicks1982 View Post

      So EZA is different to Squidoo?
      Yes, totally different.

      "Ezine Articles" is a site devoted to providing articles for ezines. Hence the name.

      The idea of the site is that all its content is freely available (within the terms and conditions specified) to people compiling ezines who are looking for content to publish in their ezines.

      These days, you can read "ezines" as "ezines and websites", and there are actually more webmasters nowadays than ezine compilers ... but the principle's the same: EZA (and all the sites "like it", which are collectively called "article directories") exist for those ezine compilers and webmasters to go there and use it as a directory, look up their ezine's/website's subject on the contents page, and find out what articles are freely available there from them to "syndicate" (re-publish).

      Authors (you and I) use article directories as a place to announce that their content is freely available to be syndicated (in exchange for a backlink or two, to be included with the article wherever it's syndicated).

      There are some people who (completely wrongly, inadvisably and misguidedly) think of article directories as being primarily "a place to put article to get a link from the directory itself back to your own site", and/or to get "potential customer traffic" to your site when people find your article in an article directory by putting one of its keywords into a search engine.

      This is called "article directory marketing" (not "article marketing") and it's more or less nonsense, for two reasons ...

      (a) The backlinks are useless (they're non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlinks - all article directory backlinks are): you'd typically need something between 50,000 and 100,000 of them to give you the link-juice equivalent to one backlink from a relevant authority site. And that was before Google's recent algorithm change has devalued the article directories still further - it's probably more like 100,000 to 200,000 of them now, not 50,000 to 100,000, and ...

      (b) You don't want your potential customers finding an article directory copy of the article, anyway (we all lose most of that traffic): you want them finding the copy originally published and indexed on your own site. You don't lose that traffic before it gets there: it's already there.

      So, broadly speaking, two different groups of people read article directory articles ...

      (i) Potential customers: these are people who find your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine and clicking on the SERP's;

      (ii) People looking not in Google but inside EZA: these are researchers, webmasters, ezine/newsletter-compilers, and so on, but they're not potential customers.

      How one uses an article directory depends on which group one's writing for, because what each will respond to is pretty much mutually exclusive.

      In the "writing for clicks" model of article marketing (this is actually just "article directory marketing", which I used to use but will now no longer touch), one is writing for the first group - potential customers. This approach is characterised by producing a large quantity of shorter articles, typically more "salesy" in tone, with a "call to action" in the resource box (all the things that will ensure nobody much syndicates it). It's what Warriors here widely refer to as a "rinse and repeat" model, i.e. you have to keep on and on producing it over and over and over again because it doesn't really produce residual income. In my opinion, it isn't really building an asset-based income, either - it's more like creating a job for yourself. I do see that one could effectively outsource and automate quite a lot of it and try to build it up into a steady, secure income, but I strongly suspect that doing so raises, for many people, several new difficulties in addition, and that the overall success-rate of this model is pretty small (and that's just "polite British understatement" - I could say it a lot more strongly).

      In the "writing for syndication" model of article marketing (this is "article marketing", not just "article directory marketing"), one is writing for the second group, potential syndicators, and in contrast to the paragraph above, creating one's articles more in line with the sort of outline described in this post. It's a radically different and (for many of us here who've tried it) a far more profitable, stable and secure approach characterised by building a real, asset-based business based on continually increasing residual income from work already done. This is the true value of article directories (though article directories are far from being the only way of getting your articles syndicated).

      Article directories don't require previously unpublished content.

      (There's one that does, called "Buzzle", but they don't allow any external links anyway, so we don't need to talk about them because they're no use to us at all).

      In contrast to all the above, sites like Squidoo and HubPages, collectively called "Web 2.0 sites" (though nobody quite knows what that means :rolleyes: ) give you a subdomain on their domain (though you can redirect a domain-name of your own to it, if you want), and you can post your content there, but it's not there for other people to syndicate.

      Typically, they put some advertising on "your" pages and split the click-money with you. Making it sound like they're doing you a favour. :rolleyes:

      These Web 2.0 sites are all a bit different: they have their own terms of service, policies and procedures. They change them whenever they feel like it. They can take your site down if they think you're breaking their terms. You don't own it - they do. It isn't safe. They can be good, though, as part of your backlinking strategy (people say). Some will accept previously published content; others won't. You have to read their TOS and see. (They generally don't allow affiliate links, though ... or at the very least they dislike them a lot and will "send the boys round to take care of you" if you use many of them ).
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      • Profile picture of the author RobertAxelsen
        Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

        In the "writing for syndication" model of article marketing (this is "article marketing", not just "article directory marketing"), one is writing for the second group, potential syndicators, and in contrast to the paragraph above, creating one's articles more in line with the sort of outline described in this post. It's a radically different and (for many of us here who've tried it) a far more profitable, stable and secure approach characterised by building a real, asset-based business based on continually increasing residual income from work already done. This is the true value of article directories (though article directories are far from being the only way of getting your articles syndicated).
        WOW! You're a fountain of information.

        TIL that one can focus solely on article marketing as a syndication strategy. I always viewed it as a nice bonus to my backlinking and direct article directory traffic.

        I'm gonna incorporate this strategy. Thanks a lot for sharing
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  • Profile picture of the author multimastery
    In this case you could publish the article to your site. You hold every right to. In fact, once it's on ezinearticles, anyone has a right to republish the article as long as it remains in tact. However, if I were you I would rewrite my article and publish a unique version on my own site. Of course you wouldn't need a resource box for your site version.
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  • Profile picture of the author powerslave
    I was foolish enough to publish original content on EZA once too, and since then I have taken those articles and re-published them on my own site, without re-writing them at all, to no detriment to the site. The 'copied' articles themselves don't rank well (as far as I know, haven't checked in ages), but I thought they would help flesh out my site a bit. The other original articles I published on my site first still rank well, so doing this doesn't cause any site-wide penalty.
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