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Should I copy free articles from directories to my website?

danielist18
Posts: 27
Joined: 11 Oct 09
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Should I copy free articles from directories to my website?

Hi,

It seems that I am allowed to copy various articles on education or whatever else I need from websites like Ezine or other free article type website and then post them on my website as original content. But I'm surprised that this is allowed because I thought that one should not copy from other websites and post them into their own site because the search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. would ban those sites because of duplicate content. So why is this allowed, why is it okay to copy articles from these websites and use them for SEO optimization? I am concerned about this and while I want to gain traffic quickly, and will do almost anything to get it, to be banned by major search engines in the end is not what I have in mind.

Please let me know your thoughts…
D
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Last edited by michellerana on 20 Oct 09 2:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 

faradina
Posts: 1895
Joined: 01 Jun 09
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Actually, you can only publish/reprint articles from ezinearticles.com but not claim them as your original content. Plus you can reprint only up to 25 articles per calendar year. Those provisos are included, among other conditions, in the ezinearticles.com terms of service for publishers and you will find that the terms of service or use of all other free article sites are similar to that of ezinearticles.com to a large extent.

Google will not exactly ban your site for reprinting articles but since such articles would then be duplicate content, your site will not stand a good chance of gaining page rank, which is what SEO is about. Google does not show pages with duplicate content in search results. This is called the duplicate content penalty.

It is not a good idea to copy articles from anywhere. What you would want to have is original content. If you find it difficult to produce original content or if you want to fill your site with original content quickly, you can either rewrite PLR articles or outsource the writing of your articles. That way, you will have original content for your website.
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danielist18
Posts: 27
Joined: 11 Oct 09
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I see...

So only original content that was never published anywhere else will be good for me.

Thanks!!!
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markling
Posts: 2071
Joined: 13 Jun 06
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The idea when using content from another source is it needs to be rewritten so that its at least 25% different from the original (you can check how unique it is using the article compare tool to check how different it is from the original.

Its just important to try and deliver to unique content, the more unique it is the better your chances of it ranking in the search engine results.
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malex86
Posts: 10
Joined: 19 Nov 09
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Hi Mark,

My problem is i'm in the seduction niche and a LOT of my content (100's of articles) are duplicates straight from the publishers affiliate back end.

What I'm worried about is since my site has so many articles that arent original for so long. is it "too late" to rank up to the first page of results from all the penalties i must of got?

Thanks
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This topic was started on Oct 20, 2009 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.