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Knowing myself being impatient in waiting for results, I cannot settle with something like AdGooroo. I dismiss the idea of waiting for days before I can actually see results. And upon receiving the reports I got from them, their services don’t seem different that what I can get for free using other tools.

And man, Adgooroo’s system demonstration is a trash! It’s purely marketing in nature without really giving a hint of what I can extract from them. Though at first impression, the choice of words in the demo voice-over is alluring as advertising tips, but if you’ll think deeper, its system demonstration does not really represent the features that AdGooroo has.

At first, Adgooroo sounded to me like a great tool but after reading their FAQs and what one can actually get for $399, I think it’s still not worth the price, because it does not provide bid management and only captures two statistics: coverage and relative rank.

I’m glad that I discover KeywordSpy, it satisfies my hunger for instant PPC keyword results, in just a click I can track all the keywords my competitors are using.

I am only messing around with KeywordSpy for a couple of minutes but I am already pretty impressed. Competition analysis definitely looks different after playing with its cool interface. The pie and scattered summary charts in KeywordSpy delighted me much than the dozen graphs of AdGooroo which are hard to figure out. And the graphical presentation of KeywordSpy does not end there, for I really enjoyed their ClickBank Affiliate Search Engine which helped me manage my keyword lists in promoting products. I am also looking forward with the integration of their Organic Keyword database and Backlink results to drag my sites’ optimization to a skyrocket figure.

Meanwhile, I am wondering why AdGooroo has the balls to rate their monthly subscription for $399! Very pricey for small businesses! I do feel it is costing merchants significant amounts. The only difference is that you get a nice visual of the same data you can obtain using the stupendous database of KeywordSpy, plus the latter even has geo-targeted regional domains for US, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, Australia and Ireland to assist local advertisers..  

Other than going for the $399 subscription of Adgooroo, I'd rather spend the $90 fee to maintain my subscription to KeywordSpy and throw the additional $309/month to my Adwords budget. And that’s the game of practicality plus quality in dealing with KeywordSpy.

The “duplicate content penalty” myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.
Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO. “Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine’s index of web pages (”de-indexing” or “delisting”).

How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?
* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR 8) and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).
* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.
* Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.
But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?
1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.
2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.
* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.
* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.
* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the “duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.

About the Author
Joel Walsh (http://www.joelwalsh.com) owns UpMarket Content which has Joel’s articles available for reprint, and also lets you order the complete website promotion content package of content and distribution services: http://www.UpMarketContent.com

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