Why post duplicate content to your blogs?
May 23, 2008
I just launched a new free service, ShareAPost.com that lets you put other people's blog posts on your own blogs in seconds. It's been a great success in the 24 hours that it's been live. There's close to 5,000 blog posts in the content directory already.
A question that kept popping up on the forum was whether or not Google is willing to rank duplicate content. People weren't sure if they should republish other folks' blog content because of the duplicate content "issue."
Now, back when my Search Engine Myths Exposed report was available, it crushed the idea that Google doesn't rank duplicate content. I won't go into the heavy detail of that report, but I'll sum it up before providing proof from the ShareAPost site itself that Google does, in fact, rank and send traffic to duplicate content.
Google makes two statements on their blog that by themselves should squash concerns over duplicate content:
- "Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized." That's a direct quote. Google makes it plain that it will not hurt you to have duplicate content on your site.
- "If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article." Again, a direct quote.
The second quote warrants a bit more explanation. Why does Google want you to get links back to the original article if you syndicate an article? That's easy: the article with the most links wins the search game.
You see, it's not the original article that necessarily ranks well in Google. Here's a search at Google which proves that (I wrote that article, and it originally appeared on this blog — but EzineArticles outranks my blog because it has more links aimed at it [I never optimized that article]).
So yes, the short of it is that Google will rank and send traffic to duplicate content. But let's have some proof, shall we? ShareAPost is made up of 100% duplicate content. Every excerpt it shows is from a post on somebody else's blog. That's its purpose: to show you content that you can post on your own blog by permission of the person who created the blog.
If the nay-sayers are right in saying that Google won't send traffic to duplicate content, then why, pray tell, is Google sending me traffic just 24 hours after I launched the service?
Don't believe me? Here's the screenshot of the domain's stats:
Yes, 117 page views from Google in the last 24 hours. And notice another benefit? Windows Live has already sent 137 page views — in 24 hours! That's 254 page views to a brand new domain with barely a half a dozen links into it in less than 24 hours.
Can you get traffic to duplicate content? Absolutely! Now let me tell you a "secret" that makes it even easier…
The "Secret" To Using Duplicate Content
When Google chooses which web page to rank for a given set of keywords, it examines the links into that page (and a number of other factors) to determine how well each matching page should rank for the keywords. If two pages of duplicate content are both optimized for the same keywords, Google will only choose one of them to show in the search results — the one that has the most links.
So to rank a full page of duplicate content, you simply need to optimize your page better than the competition's if they're trying to rank the same articles for the same keywords.
BUT THERE IS AN EASIER WAY
Want to get traffic from duplicate content the easy way? Here's how you do it:
- Setup a Wordpress blog.
- Use ShareAPost.com to post summaries of good quality articles to your blog in seconds (yes, ShareAPost has an option to post a summary instead of the full text).
- Get some links aimed at your blog.
That's it. It's really that easy.
Why Wordpress? Why Summaries?
Why post summaries of articles you feel are of good quality instead of the full post? Because you can configure Wordpress to display X number of posts per page of the blog, and when Google sees a page consisting of 5-10 small excerpts of different articles, it doesn't see it as duplicate content.
Take this one step further and group related summaries under the same Wordpress category and then Google will crawl the "category" pages and see that the material is all closely related, which is a good optimization technique.
That's right: put a bunch of brief summaries onto one page and Google sees it as a page of unique content. Shocked? Awed? In disbelief? Look back at the stats for ShareAPost if you don't believe me.
Also, as of right now ShareAPost.com only has 124 pages indexed in Google. I just added a tag cloud to the bottom of the ShareAPost home page which will produce hundreds more pages. When Google indexes those pages, what do you think will happen? That's right: Google (and the other big search engines) will send more and more traffic to those nice little summary pages. As I get more links into the site it will result in even more traffic from better rankings as well.
The Other Good Reason
Of course, that's not the only reason to post other folks' quality content to your blog. If you don't have time to update dozens of blogs by writing unique posts for each of them every day, you can find top-quality posts from ShareAPost to post to your blog instead. This gives your visitors good quality material to read, for which you can show advertisements or affiliate links.
Newspapers have been using syndicated content for this very same reason for years. Does each newspaper produce its own comic strips, or self-help advice? No! And most major newspapers use syndicated classified ads as well. More quality content to put their own ads around.
The online world is no different. Using syndicated ("duplicate") content is not a crime, and Google does not treat it as such. If you want to do full posts of great articles, just get some links into the article using some more long tail keywords (i.e. "dallas internet marketing advice" instead of "internet marketing"). What's the likelihood that others are trying to rank that same article for those same keywords? If it's slim to none, then you've got a traffic-pulling piece of "duplicate" content.
So what are you waiting for? Get over to ShareAPost.com now and start syndicating some of that content. The search engines will reward you for it!
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
Comments
84 Responses to “Why post duplicate content to your blogs?”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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Hi Jon,
I've heard you and other in the know dispel the "duplicate content penalty" so many times. But when you think about it which site is the biggest user of duplicate content none other than Google themselves.
I guess what you are saying is that you have to be smart about how you use duplicated content.
The other myth you've debunked is about creating "too many pages too quickly" because that could get your site sandboxed, well I guess 5K pages is 2 days is proof that doesn't happen
I joined shareapost.com and I have to say it's going to be one hell of a service.
It's refreshing to hear someone telling it how it is rather than scaring you to but their latest product.
good luck
I saw Andy's post on his results after only a few days. He has a few legit blogs syndicate his stuff within 24 hours.
Great job as usual, Jon!
Josh
Hey Jon! First of all I am so excited about this new tool. Thank you.
Question. What if I post the entire article but on the frontage I use the "read more" link in order to achieve the unique content. Is it just as good as using summarized posts?
Again thanks
Gilbert
Gilbert:
That will work just as well. As long as the summaries appear on the category pages, etc.
Jon is exactly right on the money. You can use articles from shareapost.com or any PLR service and easily rank higher than others using the same service just because they won't put in the extra effort to optimize their site.
Another fine product, Jon. Congrats!
Dave Jackson
Hi Jon .
By and large I agree with you but I disagree on this point.
"Google will only choose one of them to show in the search results — the one that has the most links"
It is actually possible that google will return two pages with the exact same article on them and rank them both high in the serps.
I have done this several times where an ezinearticles page ranks number 1 on Google .I copy that same article and paste it into my site and then over a few months get tons of links to that page .I can overtake them or at least rank within the top 3-4 positions behind them.I have used this to great effect many times. Think about it like this ,unless ezinearticles authors are actively link building to their own ezinearticles pages then the only reason any article page ranks 1st in Google is because of its contents uniqueness and the authority of ezinearticle.com.They have no inbound links so this makes sense.
So If I link build on overdrive I can often eclipse them with my superior link popularity
Try it…it works.
Hi Jon!
I'm having some fun with ShareAPost! I've experienced the same with duplicate content as well. Here is another tip to mix is up some more - use one of those plugins to show related posts. I think a plug-in may be called Related Posts - or for new Wordpress sites I believe widgets do the same thing.
Jonathan,
What are your thoughts of taking an exact copy of an article written for your site and posting it "unchanged" to a site like ezinearticles.com? Would you change it up?
this is a really good idea to implement
I still don't get it. Perhaps a video would be helpful?
Hi Jon,
Is this tool best used for blogs set up to aggregate these posts or is it just as powerful as a supplement to my own posting?
Thanks,
Jeff
Hi Jonathan reader’s n posters…. This must be one of the biggest questions either asked or pondered over every day on the internet by most folks who want to drive traffic to there sites you have made a good point of reference here thank you Jonathan …
I supposed in a way if the poster of duplicate content put a few summaries of different articles around the same subject the bonus for the reader would be a time saver and an over view of any chosen subject matter that the summaries covered, sounds like a decent service to any network community to me … no different to RSS feeds! …
I’m so glad you sorted these results out for one and all to see great post happy to be coming back for your kind of marketing education Jonathan
All my best to you and your summaries
Phillip Skinner
This is not true.Site that has many of duplicate content will due.
If you wanna sucess with shareapost.com it would be the best to make some tools to rewrite content such as jetsubmitter.com
Hey Jon,
Thanks a lot for this interesting post and for your new tool, which is really great.
I use a lot of PLR articles for my sites, which are also duplicated content and I always get indexed within 48 hours and I get a lot of traffic to these sites. I also get listings on the forst page in Google and the other big search engines with these duplicated content.
I like your proofs when you make a statement especially the one on this page about duplicated content.
Keep on with so many good posts. I learned a lot from them.
Daniel
duda:
Okay duda, if this is NOT true, then how did I get traffic from Google to my 100% duplicate content site?
I have SEO myths and have to go back several times to recheck after being convinced by the SEO forums that it is this way or that way.
I am finding out that most seo experts are not really sure about alot of common seo tactics they just copy someone elses info.
Jon,
I was expecting to pay for this… it sounds like this is a free sharing community. You contribute. You share. You borrow.
I really like the idea. Great idea and service!
Rich
I added a blog but still have some questions. How do I get the posts to show up on my blog? Is there a plugin or do I do it manually? Where do I choose to just show summaries? (I probably missed the directions somewhere.)
I already got a quick tip from the forum - I'm sure there will be lots more I can learn. Thanks Jon!
Nice piece of investigating Jon.
Proves my gut instinct was right all along and the duplicate content myth was made up by those selling content spinners.
Arrrrghh! I'm soooo confused. Maybe I should just go back to my regular engineering job LOL!
I'm glad you debunked that duplicate content theory again. I've noticed that building a lens using an article that I submitted to other article directories ranks in Google just fine as long as I change the lens and some tags to different keywords! The issue really isn't duplicate as much as duplicate for the same keywords.
Thank you so much for clearing this up. I have always wondered why you can't get credit for dub content. I'm glad to hear that their is proof.
HI Jon,
I got a quick question, are people on your Share-a-post network required to link back to the original post of the article?
If not, what would be the benefit of allowing others to resyndicate my content?
Thanks for all the cool tools.
peace,
Ferny
Great idea as usual Jonathan, it's interesting on these posts to see how some folks are doubtful of new things on the web because of lies they've been told by others. No worries though Jonathan, your products and your service with Amin at the helm will win them over in time if there just starting out with you. I think it just goes to show that there aren't many great marketers out there that are as honest and honorable as you are and can create outstanding software and/or services as well.
Thanks for this new service Jonathan!
David
You have blown my mind. Love the post and have signed up for sharapost. love it so far.
Keep up the great work.
Clint Lawton
Ferny:
Yes, the original post links back to yours using a randomly chosen one of the tags in your post. That gives you a variety of in-bound link texts.
This is a great service. at first I didn't quite 'get' it, but after reading this (like I should have done in the first place) I am fine with using the service; I have some quality articles and good authors are gettting more views.
It is a syndication service; an publishers' co-op.
Thanks a TON!
I really admire Jon's ideas. I have ever tried to use PLR article o my sites, not blog and I gave links back to the authors and my pages were indexed. Duplicate content + huge links with long tail keywords really can also make traffict.
Best Regards,
Ardi
mmm, i wasn't too sure about this at first, but i like your idea of how we could go about it, i think i'll give it a try with a domain or 2, both with the content syndication and sharing.
People should test for them selfs instead of just going round saying it won't work, because of something they've heard someplace else.
Jayen
Hey Jon I'm digging your concepts, especially about this duplicate content thing. As a matter-a-fact I read your 'Search Engine Myths Exposed' eBook and reviewed it on Hubpages. What made you discontinue this interesting report?
I copy a article from ezinearticles and give it some link, then i rank the fist, why, i think Jonathan is right, the most backlink is win
You fail to mention that duplicate content gets thrown in the trash about every 3 months. But it looks good to be contrary.
Jonathan you always come up with the right information… I love reading your thoughts.
ShareAPost is a big hit. Well done.
Chas:
I've provided my proof. Where's yours? The Google query I linked to showing the EzineArticles duplicate article outranking my own original blog post has been there for a year. That's rather more than 3 months.
Hi Jon,
This is definitely eye opening for me. All this time I've been worrying about duplicate content here and there from the so-called gurus. Well turns out I don't really have to worry too much then.
Thanks again for the tips. Keep more of them coming!
Keep the great stuff coming, Jon!
I especially like the newspaper (chain)syndication example. Don't forget morgue files, API, etc.
I think it might work for a while, till Google find out about the program. So why not keep this private?
Hi Jon,
Yes, another excellent post.! You have a great ability
to analyze complex information — it often overwhelms
me.
You have verified what I've long suspected, and that is
that all the hype about Google penalizing duplicate
content, is overdone and exaggerated. I've had articles
on my Natural Healing website that are also on the
EzineArticles site, and have never been penalized
for it.
Keep up the good work!
All the best,
Laurie
Man…I'm signing up right now. As you have shown us many times, test and prove it for ourselves. Don't take anyone's word and this is no different. You haven't steered us wrong yet so what makes this different?
Thanks Jonathan for putting out great stuff
Thanks for the great tip Jon. Will be tryin this out. Thanks again. ShareApost.com is a great service. Keep up the good work Jon.
Very nice John.
Maybe you could through in a bit of instructions for us dummies as to setup our addresses for the feeds and such stuff. It would sure help at least one non-geek to hook up to your share posts.
Thanks for the great info in any event.
This is an intriguing concept. In fact, it might be the tipping point — the straw that broke the camel's back that convinced me to switch over from Blogger to WP.
Hi Jon,
You may be right on this, but a few legit questions:
1) What is the benefit of putting the effort to write a great article and put it on Share A Post if lots of people will just grab my article and put it on theirs and try to outrank my article by trying to get links to their page?
2) So what is this service good for - MFAs? If lots of people are going to be using this for MFAs than I fear Google will act, and not in a nice way. It might work now, but Google also looks at the PURPOSE of the usage of duplicate content. If majority of users just use them for largely MFA sites, well it doesn't take much intelligence to figure out, that this is NOT what Google wants.
My thoughts,
Jason
A further comment,
The newspaper syndication example has long been used to promote that duplicate content is alright.
But, the nature of newspaper sites is DIFFERENT. How many newspaper sites do well in Google? Not MFA driven newspaper sites. Rather more like CNN, or Forbes…or local newspapers that are already LARGE COMPANIES.
The average MFA site created by the average Joe will not get the same treatment, because you have a million average Joes out there.
Great stuff Jon ! I think you are a master mind.Am a newbie in internet marketing so I Wonder if you can please do something like a step by step way on how one can use your Shareapost.That is for newbies like me.Thanks.
Yes, Jon is right that Google will rank duplicate content - use any service like Article Marketer or Unique Article Wizard and you'll see hundreds of duplicate pages ranked in the SERPs. However, a lot, if not most, of that will drop out of the SERPs over time where specific measures aren't being taken to help the ranking of those individual articles.
So, as has already been stated in these comments, just do a bit - literally just a bit of backlinking - to help the ranking of the articles and you'll be streets ahead of the competition. Just slap up stuff and expect to be there for the duration though and you'll be disappointed.
One final point - article snippets pages are little different from RSS feed formatted pages. They'll never rank for anything in particular (unless you're very specific in feed choice) because there's no theming, but they do keep the spiders active.
It's about time someone finally spoke the truth about this stuff. There's so much mis information out there.
I use Jon's advice and rank in the top 10 for over 1600 keywords!
Thanks!
Jon, You are great!
I really love your articles and write ups. Honestly, I get bombarded with different 'marketers' and some dish alot of 'crap'.
You are one of the few that I respect and listen to!
You are one guy I always enjoy receiving new info from!
Your information is always useful–not jus tabout selling me the next big thing..and that is rare today!
Thanks..keep it up!
Wow, what a GREAT idea!
I usually have a big worry on duplicate content, but now I must give a try! I always love your products, all of them are terrific!
Keep up the great work, Jon!
Brilliant Jon ! Thanks for outstanding software and/or services as well.
This concept by Jon is CRAZILY revolutionary!
I just read about it today and I am still reeling from the shock of its potential - if used sensibly.
Thank you Jon, please continue to labour on our behalf.
CashJG
Another fantastic product Jon!
How many hours a week do you work?! You never seem to stop…
Jon,
Great information! It is evident that you understand the reasoning behind search engine behavior. Thanks for another great tool.
Great stuff Jon. OK I just worked it out. When you sign up you look through the directory for an article you would like on your blog and press publish. I have done that and I am very impressed with the quality of the articles I am getting and posted to my blog (automatically).
Now, how many times would you do this. One or two maybe more a day or just once a day? I would be very interested in this as I believe it to be very important that it does not set off any patterns with G.
Thanks
TerryG
1. Greetings Jon.
2. It is good to read from someone who understands what is going on out there in the search engine world.
3. All search engines equally share snippets from all other sites across the globe, so, what will be the reason for their own collecting all your information and aggregating it and telling you not to do same? Sounds clear? Hope so.
4. If you know how to set up a service that aggregates information just like what Jon did with shareapost, there is no harm in it and as a matter of truth, that is what all the widgets you see is all about but since people sometimes get so diversified in their focus, there is less power in those widgets and aggregation services as against the main search engines we all clamour for.
5. By the way, what is Technorati doing? Go check it out and then you can believe everything Jonathan is telling us here without further iota of doubt.
6. Thank you for the email, that made it possible for me to keep up with what is going on here.
7. Remain blessed and a blessing and speak soon by the grace of God.
8. Regards, Olakunle Solomon Fatoye.
9. And by the way, you need to answer that question for real…
10. How many hours do you work in a single day Jonathan? 96 hours?!
Thanks so much for sharing your great ideas Jon.
Now I learned another 'Secret Technique' for getting content and traffic to my site. You're very dedicated to your work, so I believe you'll always achieve great success in everything you do!
Okay, to answer a few more questions:
1. How many hours a week do you work?
About 40, but I am VERY focused while working. No time for fluff or "busy work."
2. How many times per day should I post a summary to my blog?
Keep it random. Post once a day today, twice a day tomorrow, none on the third, etc. That way there is no "pattern" — not that I'm convinced a pattern in this regard matters to G. How many newsletters are posted every Friday at noon? Google doesn't seem to have a problem with that.
3. What made you discontinue Search Engine Myths Exposed?
Spammers who were creating bogus accounts to download the report so they could steal $0.25 from me per account. None of those guys got paid — as if I wouldn't catch onto them — but they were too much trouble to keep dealing with.
More gems of relevant wisdom - a great help as ever to the likes of me who often seems to be banging his head against the Google brick wall
I've been doing this for at least 2 years my self , i have never created my own content and yet i get search engine traffic to all my sites, i also rank on the first and second pages of Google for a number of my sites.
Hi im an seo consultant based in London and use duplicate content all the time. dont worry about duplicate content. I have a page of duplicate content ranked #1 on Google for the term "seo marketing training" (without quotes) for the last 5 months. the SERPS page also includes Greenlight, Big Mouth Media and Bruce Clay, all of which are industry bigwigs and im outranking them with NO effort.
A Big Thnakyou to Jonathan Leger from SEO London..take note he really knows his stuff !!!
Jonathan,
Thank you for taking the stress out of duplicate content and providing your readers with good solid honest information. Now I am excited about starting a blog! I get ton's of marketing emails a day and make sure to read every one of yours and a couple others! All the rest I delete.
Thanks for providing such valuable information.
Hey Jonathan readers n posters above … great update and reading in this excellent thread … the internet is like a great big information note book and the pages keep turning every day as now the pages are turning with Video format “even if we don’t want it too” … with this latest concept better information is available immediately for those folks who dip into this network mix of video information every day trying to solve there current wishes to find the latest greatest secret to wealth and prosperity and usually miss the point of the greatest secret is … ACTION … by taking ACTION on information learned comes to the mindset as knowledge learned so success can turn to WISDOM once that knowledge is implemented with strategies to the desired outcome …
Remembering that old saying by Benjamin Franklin "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different Results” I for one didn't understand the saying the first time I heard it, so it wasn't effective on me as it was intended to be. But I expect if my more successful friends keep quoting it, and quoting it, and quoting it, eventually, I might catch on and find the Truth that Lies Deep Within this Wise Saying.
All my best to you and your Strategy vs. Tactics
Phillip Skinner
Wow, this is incredible! I've been operating under the impression that duplicate content was harmful this whole time. I can't believe it's not, this changes a lot of things.
Great thoughts. I am going to try out the Share a Post. Thanks
Hey John, Thanks.. I had a look at share a post, and think it is a great idea indeed. Once I find the time, I will log in and start a few trials
Thanks for your efforts
Hi Jon!
That's a very useful report. But then why someone try to generate unique content? I am not making any sense.
Jon,
Great article - I appreciate your comments and insights (as always) and am signing up for share a post now. thanks!
Hi Jon,
Nice to know that you come up with this new tool. And I'm sure that this really contributes lots of traffic in blogs or websites. What's important about it is that one could not be penalized in posting duplicate articles. Thanks for this great info and for a thorough explanation.
Jonathan:
Wow I really love your objectivity in your blog posts. As someone with an Science Degree and one who works in the medical-legal realm, I can really appreciate sound, evidenced-based data that strongly supports your 'duplicate content' debate'.
Thanks for all the support and great content.
Sincerel,
Daniel
Jonathan:
Totally off-topic and if you don't respond I will understand: By the way, I too have a Revolution Wordpress blog theme from Brian Gardner. How do you change the header?
Daniel
Daniel:
You have to modify the logo.gif file. It should be in this location under your blog folder:
/wp-content/themes/revolution-20/images/logo.gif
Jon
Thanks for the insightful post. It is always good to read your posts, I always learn a lot. Blogging is something that I do, but not to the extent that I should.
ok Jonathan. I like your idea but how long this method works?
Hi Jon, i think you are absolutely right…Just for fun sake i created a humor blog with jokes and blah blah…it has only copied and pasted posts and inspite of this, my blog ranks #1 for my primary keyword, #3 for 2 of my secondary keywords in google and yahoo without even giving links to the original page that i copied the posts from..
And also consider the lyrics site…
Whats to stop you from running around and grabbing content off of sites and then just putting the first couple of paragraphs as snippets - then you could use any content management system.
Jon,
This is all very interesting. I am curious as to why you think people who used duplicate content programs such as trafficequalizer etc that scraped listings have poor or no rankings these days. My understanding was that this is due to the duplicate filters.
Deb
Hi Jon,
What a great idea. I will sign up today. And thanks for sharing all these other tips and advice in this post with all of us.
Thanks,
Elizabeth
Jon,
You rock! Great work! I have a few of your products now and thinking of purchasing the rest. It's so good that someone is telling the "truth" and giving great info. I am becoming a true fan! Thanks again! Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the great idea Jon!
I don't know…when I open my e-mail and there are Jonathan Leger email…I start to open it first..Great job Jon..You've changed my opinion.
Yani has just put their finger on it! If I have 30 emails in my inbox, the one marked Jon Leger will always get opened first!
I have been using shareapost on a couple of blogs now for about 3 weeks, I will be adding the rest over the next week! Actions speek louder!
Another thought provoking post from perhaps the one person who is prepared to back his thoughts and ideas with decent research and proof.
And free to boot
Appreciated as ever
Hello Jon,
Thank you for your articles, these help me a lot, once more thank you Jon.
man thanks for the valuable info. about duplicate content. I had no idea that Google actaully has a quote that you will NOT be penalized for duplicate content !!
Great heads up