Questions about duplicate content from articles on my sites and on linking pages

By George, I think she's got it!

No; this is wrong.

Sometimes (not always!) Google chooses just one version to index in the main index and all the other copies go in the supplemental index instead, where their backlinks carry just the same weight but they're not going to get traffic.

Again, Dani, what you're referring to isn't duplicate content.

Well, if you've read the stuff in the links above, you've now seen the statement from Google's WebMaster Blog: "We will not penalize your site for duplicate content". It doesn't come any more authoritative than that.

Yes, I think this is to some extent true.

And article directories, for the same reason.

What's happened here is that you're not getting any "SEO-credit" for the content you've syndicated to your site. It's not that you're being penalised for it, at all. Plenty of top-ranking sites carry plenty of syndicated content, and there's no downside to that at all, and absolutely NO reason to remove it. (Look at all the international news websites packed with content syndicated from Reuters and Associated Press - it's not doing them any harm, is it?).

What you need is some quality, fresh content with it.

I'm not sure they care whether it's technically an "autoblog". As far as their algorithms are concerned, it's like an article directory, isn't it? Most of its content is previously published. Nothing wrong with that, no penalties for it, but not much reward, either.

"Syndicated content", not "duplicate content".

That isn't the problem, I think. The problem is the lack of other content.

Very much so, yes.

And becoming more and more so all the time.

And Google says this is part of an "ongoing process", and more is expected.

I don't know to what extent your on-site advertising might also be bad for SEO. Some people say it is. Some people say it will become increasingly bad for SEO (there've been a couple of threads discussing that point, over the last few days).

"Safely" in the sense of "being free from any penalty", yes: absolutely. That has always been the case.

But you won't (in theory) get any SEO benefit from that content (in reality you may get a little bit).

People who syndicate content (and I make a living from having mine syndicated) aren't doing so for any SEO benefit. They're doing so to benefit their readers.

To summarise: I think the key concept, here, to answer your original question, is that this has nothing to do with any "minus points" from Google at all: it's simply about the lack of "plus points". Your rankings aren't going to improve from removing the syndicated content, because that was never doing you any harm anyway. You just need some decent non-syndicated content (with or without the syndicated content), for Google to like the site for on-page SEO.

Yes; it's the way press releases work, after all. Syndication of content does not need spinning of any kind, and obviously works very well, otherwise press release sites would start asking for unique content.

best wishes,

Jon.

That will always be your own website, though. (Or do you mean "if you had two different websites in the same niche"?).

Yes - although it's an "older ebook" it's really surprising how modern and relevant it is, "post-Panda".

Absolutely. It was only when I learned to do this here, myself, three years ago, that I really started learning anything much that was reliably useful and translated into income and building a business.

Ooh, it's one of those questions where you just know you're going to offend someone by leaving them out! :p

The others who spring immediately to mind are AnniePot, Nicola Lane, tpw, Richard Van, JayXtreme (mostly older posts - he was one of the people whose advice I followed, myself, albeit not so many posts of his specifically on this subject, perhaps: more "in general"). And of course various others who didn't spring immediately to mind only because my memory and concentration are absolutely dreadful, for which profuse apologies and absolutely no offense to anyone at all!!

Thats not true at all...

How many times have you conducted KW/niche research only to find low PR sites outranking higher PR sites? Both sites have content on them...

As Rsberg rightly says, this is completely wrong. Especially these days (and it's a growing tendency, too).

We can all easily verify for ourselves the regularity with which, in Google's SERP's, lower-PR pages with fewer incoming backlinks can outrank higher-PR pages with more backlinks.

The role that "page ranks" play in determining rankings is becoming less and less significant, year by year, almost month by month, "before our very eyes".

I didn't mean you would have to abandon your sites....just WP Robot, or at least that is what those people told me eventually fixed the issues.

Plugins are notorious for leaving footprints and are easily tracked, it's been said that WP Robot is one of the worst when it comes to this. Dumping the plugin from your site and adjusting its content seems to be the best fix for loss of rank on autoblogs that used it...according to what others have told me anyway.

Best of luck!

OK so it would seem that most of what I have been told over the last 18 months is a little wide of the mark. Article syndication rather than article directory marketing seems to make more sense. My question is, if a little daft to some, how does EZA or any other directory know that the exact article you have posted on your site and then to them is in fact your original content. I mean they will pick up that the content is already out there does it have to be credited under the same pen name that you use on EZA?

Also what is the best resource to learn more about article syndication?