Google has been put on trial and found GUILTY of Discrimination. You read it here first, Google discriminates against certain types of content and links and there is nothing you can do about it. Well, almost nothing. What you CAN do is do it right the first time and you won’t have anything to worry about it. Let’s discuss.

Duplicate Content

I frequent the BANS forums a lot and there is always a number of questions revolving around content creation. As is usually the case, most know that content is critical, but they don’t want to do any work to create it. I see a lot of interest in using Ezine articles or article spinning software.

Posting Ezine articles on your site is almost useless. If you follow the rules and keep the original authors bio intact then all you are doing is advertising for them. If you remove their information then you are breaking the TOS for Ezine and STILL won’t get ahead because Google will easily recognize your article as duplicate content and pay it absolutely no attention. That’s right…they discriminate against duplicate content. Not all content is created equally.

I often hear people referring to a duplicate content penalty, I am not aware of any “penalty” you pay as much as the search engine will simply ignore the duplicate content. If you use enough duplicate articles then I suppose Google might consider removing your site from the index altogether. That would surely be a penalty I wouldn’t want to pay. I don’t think they do that but I am not going to be the one to find out.

No matter how you spin it, duplicate content will not help your cause in any way so why bother?

Article Directories

Even though I am a big fan of building Web 2.0 links, I still write a lot of articles related to my sites as well. These take considerably longer but they have a number of benefits that directory submissions and social bookmarks don’t offer.

First they advertise for your site. If a search engine visitor is searching on blue widgets and they come across your “blue widget” article on Ezine that grabs their attention and directs them to your blue widget site then you just gained a potential customer.

Second they allow you to build very high quality backlinks. Google will take a number of things into account when evaluating your links, PR of the two pages, the title tag of the two pages, the keyword densities of the two pages, the anchor text of the links etc. A well prepared article can really hit a homerun on all of these accounts and generate a strong backlink for you. Ezine (my favorite) is currently a PR6 backlink.

Third they carry a lot of authority with Google. At least some of them do. I don’t waste my time submitting to 100 different article directories. It has been my experience that at least half of them are completely ignored by Google and usually barely (if ever) even get the link indexed. I only use a handful of different article sites and Ezine is my clearcut favorite.

I often hear of people taking and submitting the same article to a number of different directories AND using it on their site to boot. Big mistake. The more you post that article around the web then the less weight it carries so why bother. If you are just doing it for the link, then skip the article altogether and just use a bookmarking site or link directory instead.

If you must use the same articles, then at least rewrite them a BARE minimum of 30% and I personally would rewrite 75% or better of it before I reused it. It doesn’t take that much effort and once you practice you can knock out articles at will.

Content Creation

Another mistake I think some make is thinking that they need to be writing a masterpiece or something. It is not necessary to have the mind of a Stephen King or the word count of a Tolstoy. It not that difficult to write 300-400 words on just about any subject. I can knock out a 400 word article in about 15 minutes that I think most would deem pretty decent.

I struggled with content creation in the early days but I found that cheating a bit helped me out tremendously. What I did was find an Ezine article that was close to what I had in mind for my article and then rewrite that. I found it be MUCH easier to rewrite someone else’s article than it was to write an article from scratch.

The articles would always pass Copyscape and they were my own words and thoughts, they just used someone else’s article as a blueprint. I don’t know if this will work for everyone but it worked great for me and might help you get started.

Once you have been writing for a few weeks then I’d be willing to bet you can transition to writing your own stuff from scratch quite easily. I should mention that it also helped that I was writing on this blog quite frequently too.

Conclusion

I chose my title to the post kind of tongue in cheek but in reality it is quite true. Google will discriminate against duplicate content and who knows just how far they are willing to take it. If you use enough duplicate content then you could be labelled a spam site and be removed altogether.

It really isn’t worth it and if you are going to become a serious niche site builder then you will have to master the art of content creation. You might not like it, but the facts are the facts. Start out rewriting other people’s articles and it will get easier.

I would strongly advise against using article spinners. I hate those things and while they may work today, Google is quickly working on Latent Semantic Indexing which will be able to determine if your articles make sense. Spinners will be in trouble then and to be honest, they don’t work that great now anyways.

The bottom line is that content creation is one of those things you will have to develop a gameplan for and to master. It is CRITICAL to ranking well in the SERPS and to draw longtail traffic. Try some of the things we discussed and see if they work for you.

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Update: I recently shared the revenue of one of my newly created niche sites.  It finished its first month at 70 dollars and I told you my goal for the site was about 100 per month.  It’s June 16th and I am almost at 100 dollars month to date.  I am currently sitting at 94 dollars with another 15 days to go.  Keep you posted but if you haven’t considered using BANS to build your niche sites then it’s your loss.