Hmmm . . just visited ezine and don't see the value

Thanks everyone -

Not sure I understand Alexa's last paragraph, but will try to assimilate all the info.

On an aside - I ordered 3 fiver article writing gigs a few weeks ago in an effort to gauge the competiton so to speak (I thought article writing might be a possible avenue for me). One never delivered, one wasn't bad, but the other was a very disparate article. At the time I thought it was just bad writing technique, but now that I've visited ezine, I wonder if the seller didn't just peruse like-minded articles and copy/paste a few different paragraphs for his "article".

Will need do do some more research, but I appreciate the comments.

Thanks again.

It's multiple copies of the same text within one domain: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post7443850

If you put two or more copies of it within one domain, those two or more would be duplicate content. The rest are syndicated content.

It doesn't help "at all" (but that isn't the reason, though it's also true).

I don't share your implicit assumption that a Web 2.0 site is necessarily more valuable than an article directory. (I see that there are ways you can choose to make it so, but in my opinion they're misguided ways, and a poor use of your time, energy and effort for considerably less benefit than you could have got by expending that time, energy and effort in ways that don't involve using "Web 2.0 sites").

What do you mean by "index rate"?

I hope and trust you're not implying that whether Google indexes something depends on whether or not it's previously been published? Or that the linkjuice value to your site of any given backlink depends on whether the content to which it's attached has previously been published? Or that the linkjuice value to your site of any given backlink depends on whether it happens to be in the "main index" or in the "supplemental index" on that particular day? Please excuse me if I malign you, but many people do make those assumptions, all of which are entirely mistaken.

The reason people spin content before submitting it to "their" pages in other people's "Web 2.0 sites" is usually the fact that many Web 2.0 sites don't accept syndicated content. So they're making the text they submit unrecognizable to Google (they hope!) as "previously published" by spinning it. Effectively, they're giving the Web 2.0 site "unique content" (they hope).

Typically, people do this because (a) they believe that backlinks from a page with higher PR will be worth more to them, regardless of the context-relevance of the whole site on which their backlink appears (in other words, they've misunderstood what makes backlinks valuable), and (b) they get confused between the page rank of a site's own home page and "their" page on it, often imagining - for example - that the fact that Squidoo's own home page is PR-7/8 is somehow going to give "their" page on Squidoo a higher page rank (quite untrue, of course, and not very relevant anyway. It's true that they can build the page rank of "their" page on someone else's Web 2.0 site in exactly the same way that they can do that for a page on a site they own and control themselves, and it may even be true that on a site like Squidoo's they can do that slightly more easily than they could on a site they themselves own and control - I don't realy believe it but I can't prove I'm right on that point, so it suits me to acknowledge the possibility - but that doesn't help much anyway, the important point being that the one thing they can't do on Squidoo's site is to make the site relevant to theirs: they can make only their lens relevant to their own site, but unfortunately for them that isn't what primarily determines the linkjuice value :p ).

It's not easy to disucss it with people who believe this, though: it's rather like trying to discuss "link diversity" with someone selling backlinks, who wants his audience to believe in the concept so that crap backlinks will acquire some potential benefit in their minds (simply because "crap backlinks" are different from "good backlinks" and "difference" means about the same as "diversity" so that "must" be a "good thing" :p ). In this context, the equivalent concept to that example's "link diversity" is the one called "domain authority" (a term often used by people promoting Web 2.0-related services in their signature-files and/or in WSO's ). You can see what I'm saying, here, I think? It's hard to discuss sensibly in a forum in which there are so many people with various different kinds of vested interests in bandying about pseudo-scientific terms which confuse their audience and lend themselves an unwarranted air of credibility and authority (they hope!). Ultimately, people just have to decide for themselves by whom they want to be guided. But I digress. Frequently.

It's more beneficial to your SEO than painting your toenails and going out for lunch, yes. But it doesn't help as much as doing something sensible and better-planned and not based on largely mistaken assumptions. The situation is analgous to the issue arising when people ask "Are there people earning $100 per month from Squidoo?". Of course there are, and quite large numbers of them. But that isn't important and it isn't a reason to use Squidoo. What's important is how much they'd be earning if - instead of using Squidoo - they did whatever they're doing at Squidoo on pages on (even free) hosting elsewhere which they themselves own and control. And the answer is typically "more than $100 per month". I know we're talking about "backlinks" here rather than "income", but the same thing is true.

What gives backlinks value is relevance. You can increase the relevance of your artificially constructed backlinks by not building them on Web 2.0 sites. (It's the relevance of the site that really matters, not the relevance of the page, of course - otherwise article directory backlinks would be worth something, but they're not)

All the people who point out, so regularly, that spinning has no benefits mean that it has no benefits compared with not spinning. Nobody's suggesting that it's impossible to spin material and still get backlinks from it. The point is that they're no better than the backlinks you can get without spinning (and in reality they're often a lot worse). For the most part, people who do this and imagine that they gain by doing it are simply making an "attribution error". But unfortunately "attribution error" is notoriously difficult to explain.

The following five items explain much more about spinning.

• this post explains the benefits of spinning
• the first half (or so) of this thread contains a good discussion of what you can gain from spinning articles
• the advice on this subject given by so many people throughout most of this thread has been really helpful to many people here
• on the meaning and significance of "duplicate content", in this context, this little post from expert article marketer Anne Pottinger includes direct quotations from Google's WebMaster Central Blog on the subject (not easy to find a more authoritative source than that!)
• this little article is also a very useful and accurate explanation of the subject.

You don't even need to do that. Spinning has no benefits for you - period. It's based entirely on a fundamental misunderstanding. The only people who gain from it are the people selling spinning software and services. Here's the key point: since the value to your site of any backlink on any given page of the web has absolutely nothing at all to do with whether or not the content to which it's attached has previously been published, there's nothing to gain by making the content "unique" (not that most spinning even does that anyway!), so there's no need for it, and nothing to think about, here.

Exactly so - all of that.

If you depend on off-page SEO and Google rankings, then this is so, yes.

If you get content syndicated, though, it will be on "relevant enough" sites, because webmasters of irrelevant sites wouldn't want to publish your articles anyway?

(And the only purpose in your submitting it to Ezine Articles - which of course isn't a relevant site - is to use Ezine Articles for its intended purpose of serving as a stepping stone toward reaching some additional relevant sites, if/when their webmasters find your article there and choose to re-publish it. Article directories have no purpose other than this, and can serve no benefit other than this. EZA's own backlink is worthless to you. It was even in 2009/10, before all those Panda updates decimated the SEO potential of article directories.)

The backlinks are just a small side-benefit, in article marketing. It's true they can be great backlinks, if the articles are written for syndication, and if they're actually syndicated, which of course means approaching people in the right sort of way to ask them to re-publish your articles.

Absolutely right.

It makes no difference whether Google knows or not.

Even if Google didn't know, and you could "spin an article" and fool Google every single time, you still wouldn't be gaining anything from that, anyway.

Because the value to your site of any backlink on any given page of the web has absolutely nothing at all to do with whether or not the content to which it's attached has previously been published. So there isn't anything there to "gain" anyway.

Here's a one-post overview of how article marketing works, if it helps anyone (the last paragraph comments on the backlinks): http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794

Every single person who uses EZA in the course of successfully doing article marketing for a living, Nail.

There's not much point in submitting to an article directory an article that you haven't previously published and had indexed on your own site, for all the reasons explained in this thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...marketing.html .

And if you look through this longer thread, you'll find it packed with successful article marketing experts explaining all their shared reasons for publishing their articles on their own site first, having them indexed there, and then submitting them to EZA: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...eza-first.html

To "drive traffic to your site"?! That would be very futile, and counterproductive, and is more likely to damage your business than to help it. (We all lose most of that traffic, but can choose instead to keep it all by attracting it to our own site in the first place, instead of to an article directory which makes its own living out of all the traffic that doesn't reach our site).

No article marketer wants to use Ezine Articles to "drive traffic to their site".

That isn't how article directories work at all. It never has been.

Nobody's suggesting that people should do that.

The people who do that are the same ones starting off all the threads here with titles like "Is Article Marketing Dead?" (For them, it is!).

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872

Whether Google chooses to define blocks across domains as 'duplicate' or not, they've been adamant that there is no 'dulicate content penalty' for syndicated content. Even in the case of true duplicate content, such as a blog page which can be reached via several urls, they simply choose which version to display for a given search.

You have a slight misunderstanding here. Google will not spider every page, collate duplicated (syndicated or otherwise) content, and then decide which copy to index. They index it all. I can search for an article I syndicated ten years ago, and get back a list of the sites still carrying it. If G only chose one copy to index, that would not be possible.

It is true that G will only display one instance of an article or other piece of content. Whether or not the copy on your own website is the one which will be displayed depends on more than where it was indexed originally. I want my original article on my site to come up, obviously. But if that isn't going to happen, I want my original article, hosted on a related site, to come up. Not a watered down or spun version done in the interest of "uniqueness" as defined by passing some mechanical filter like Copyscape. If all else fails, I want my original article to come up on a directory.

The second and third alternatives have benefits beyond mere "linkjuice". Showing up on a related site, especially a popular one, puts my content as I intended it to be read in front of active consumers of said content. And it does so with the tacit endorsement of the site owner or publisher. The third (directory) listing puts my content as I intended it to be read in front of potential publishers, where benefit #2 kicks in.

Although I far from a serious SEO guy, I have learned that when it comes to Google, the only real constant is that they will do what is in the best interests of the searchers, which in turn serves the best interest of the stockholders. Once you learn a market or niche, people are far more consistent than bits of software crawling, indexing and displaying web pages.

Edit: On a side note, what's the deal with saying something is "80% unique"? As I see it, the quality of uniqueness is like pregnancy - either you is, or you ain't. I don't see a girl going to her parents, boyfriend or husband and saying "the bad news is that I'm pregnant - the good news is that I'm only 40% pregnant...":p

Yes, I know ... this has been debated here for years. In that context, they're actually talking about duplicated content, rather than duplicate content, to all intents and purposes. I was slightly concerned, reading your post above, that you might choose to quote this. ("Concerned" only because it's far more prejudicial than probative, and has never helped anyone to understand the point on the many previous occasions it's been discussed here).

To be fair, Google goes to great lengths to differentiate between duplicate content (on one domain) and syndicated content (on different domains).

Sorry, I don't believe that at all. That's never been my experience at all, nor the experience of other article marketers I know. It's pretty easily verifiable by anyone who wants to check it out for themselves.

To me, that's on a par with the people who say that blog webmasters with high quality sites "will only publish unique content" or that "Ezines Articles will only publish unique content". There's a whole army of us making our livings and building our businesses out of the fact that all these assertions are simply incorrect.

If you're going to allege something as outlandish as that, then you get to be the one who adduces some convincing evidence to "justify" it.

That's not so. (What do you imagine the "supplemental index" is for? ).

Interviews with Matt Cutts, comments on Google's own sites, all my own experience over the last 4 years, all the experience of other more longstanding, equally successful article marketers I know and trust, the opinions of orthodox textbook writers, and so on.

No; that isn't a "fact" at all: it's just a completely erroneous belief.

All the article marketers I know appreciate that this is entirely mistaken.

A little more than "may be true": it is true.

To justify that perspective, you'd have to make out that syndicated content isn't always indexed, but the reality is that anyone who spends a little time checking it out can see for themselves that that's mistaken.

With apologies, not from me, thanks. Over the last 3-4 years, I've done more than my share of discussing and explaining this here at great length and in great detail (usually with threads-full of people promoting spinning services in their sig-files, some of whom have subsequently and spontaneously contacted me, a long time afterwards, to apologize and explain that they've changed their minds and were mistaken at the time. That's been very decent of one or two people with whom I'd had considerable public arguments in the past, and I was both pleased and actually pretty impressed to hear from them. I'd have preferred them to say it in public rather than in private, of course, but there are limits to what can reasonably expect, and nobody's going to relish fessing up in public that they were previously selling here services for which there was actually no need at all, are they?).

If you really choose (for some reason) to believe that syndicated content is (for some reason) "less likely to be indexed than unique content" (though I've never even heard someone selling spinning software allege that, myself - and it's certainly never been true of any of my own syndicated content, nor that of others I know!), then we'll just have to agree to differ on that specific point.

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5273419

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5286678

Sid, it depends on what shade you use, and whether you paint with your right or left hand...

Blog comments on relevant posts can have value, while comments sprayed across unrelated blogs (especially the auto-accept spam magnets) have little to negative value. Do you want your comment and link in the same stream of comments as a few hundred Viagra or porn peddlers?

Press releases that get picked up by relevant outlets obviously have value. I do believe that some of the 'press release' sites are little more than renamed article dumps, with no more value than 99.9% of the article directories out there.

Most of the other tricks you mentioned are obvious attempts to manipulate search rankings. As such, if they still have any residual value, it will be short-lived.

I think some web 2.0s may still have value. Folks are getting traction with sites like tumblr, for example. But the ones I hear from are doing it by participating in the community and building a rep (dare I say it, a brand?) in the community. They're not using the sites like an article dump just for backlinks.

Automated submissions, especially as a service, are used for leverage. Charge anywhere from $5 one time to $97 or $197 per month for a task that takes a few minutes to set up and runs on its own. Legitimate, white hat tactics don't lend themselves to that kind of leverage. People who acquire the necessary skills usually realize they can do themselves more good by putting those skills to use in their own behalf.