Tony's Big Thing on the Web

Publishing web content with Articles can be a very hit and miss affair as some of my previous tests with Article Announcer and Google’s Duplicate Content Filtering have shown when publishing my own original content articles:

Article Announcer Review - Testing Product Claims and Google's Duplicate Internet Content Filter in Action

Despite this many webmasters still believe it’s an effective way to add pages to their web sites by using other people’s article content. With the web growing at an ever increasing rate it seems clear that search engines needed to find ways to cut out duplicate content.

If you think about it, why would search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN want to keep spending money adding computer resources to index and store all this duplicate content.

If a search engine has a page indexed for an article, why would they want to index and store 400 more pages exactly like it ?

Of course, in reality they don’t and it’s one reason why Google in particular is so keen to remove as much duplicate content as they can, or at least get it down to a more manageable amount.

To try and side step the search engine’s duplicate content filters web content publishers have resorted to various methods to modify articles to make them slightly different from the 400 others using the same article.

It was perhaps 6 months ago I saw an increasing number of solutions being promoted to automatically modify articles. This they did by inserting new paragraphs at random into articles, or changing words in the article in an effort to make them look less like what every one else was using.

It was being suggested one should aim to have at least 20% original or changed content in an article to avoid the duplicate content filters. The problem with all this is that it’s only a matter of time before the search engines learn how to detect even this sort of content.

If the changes following Google’s Big Daddy update are anything to go by it would seem Google has taken another step forward in detecting and removing this sort of content. Many webmasters have reported entire sites being dropped from Google’s index and Adsense revenue completely drying up as a result.

Many webmasters have also resorted to the next countermeasure.
They are buying private label rights (PLR) articles or subscribing to membership sites that provide 100’s of freshly written articles every month.

My own personal experience of some of these PLR articles is that they are of very poor quality, written by ghost writers, who it’s clear, frequently know very little about the subject they are writing about.

I don’t blame the ghost writers, after all, when they are being paid just a few dollars per article, what can you expect.

I’m sure the counter argument is, who cares ?

Webmasters just want pages to put on their websites that firstly get indexed and secondly ranked by the search engines. They then hope to get some traffic and make money from Adsense or other advertising.

One of the more enlightened sources of web publishing content using articles that I have been looking at over the past few months is Article Underground.

I should make it clear I don't use Article Underground and this blog entry is not in any way promoting it.

Mike Liebner who runs Article Underground has produced some excellent videos that walk you through the steps you need to take when publishing articles, not just his, but any article.

Of course, the videos are a promotional platform for Article Underground but that’s to be expected. In the video’s you see how he chooses article subjects to have his ghost writers create articles about using keyword research.

I have stressed the importance of Keyword Research many times on my site but it’s still a mystery to many newbie webmasters who simply just don’t understand it, or worse still think they do.

As someone who has been perfecting keyword research and discovery for many years I can say that Mike Liebner has a good system. I don’t fully agree with some of his assumptions and it’s clear he doesn’t fully understand some of the issues himself, but none the less it’s a good process.

Mike also shows in a video, some traffic and Adsense click results for a simple website he created and you can see the progress he makes with it over a couple of months.

Whilst he admits the results are modest ones, he is being realistic about the earnings from his example site and for that I give him credit. He does show some spreadsheet predictions of revenue, but for me there are some very big but’s and if’s in his forecasts.

Since Article Underground has been going now for 6 months, I would have expected him to show results for a website with more than 2 to 3 pages.

The expectation of any webmaster joining Article Underground is clearly to be able to use some of the 400 articles per month they get and to publish them as web content. This they can do, using the processes that come with Article Underground membership.

The assumption in all this is that a member can achieve the same sort of results or better, than Mike shows in his video. However, I feel there is one big flaw in this argument and that is Mike is not using articles that the membership uses.

If you’re wondering why, not using the same articles as Article Underground members matters, I’ll explain.

As a member getting your copy of an article indexed and ranked by a search engine you are competing against other members using the same article.

Mike on the other hand is not competing against anyone since he uses articles that no one else is using. He makes it clear he does not use articles from the membership.

Mike Liebner does make it clear that there’s a lot more to publishing web content with articles than just putting up a web page and he’s right, there is a lot more to it.

So is it still effective to publish web content with PLR articles ?

Yes for the time being, but how long it will last very much depends on the search engines. How much you will earn from it with the likes of Adsense is a completely different topic on which you will find a blog entry called Adsense Videos from Michael Cheney.

Tony Simpson
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