tolits's Blog

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

While US advertisers have the choice among numerous commercial SEO tools, their European counterparts have little or no choice at all. The necessity for a keyword research tool that provides accurate keyword data for specific regions is very high and still assiduous.

KeywordSpy recognized that need, at least for the UK advertisers, after the successful debut of its exclusive UK version (http://keywordspy.co.uk) at the recently held SEO Conference in London.

According to John Brent, KeywordSpy’s Chief Executive Officer, keyword research is an essential first step in developing one’s plan to improve website’s rankings in the search engines, so there is NO way for the KeywordSpy Team to allow the British region, which is the world’s 5th largest economy, be left out in the quest for online profitability. http://keywordspy.co.uk

“Our service will primarily cater online businesses serving Britons, UK websites serving the local market and SEO companies and design agencies with UK clients,” Brent expanded.

KeywordSpy has strongly built its reputation on tested competitors’ keywords by daily updating its extensive keyword database. It covers a wider demographic area than any other paid tools available making it a better choice for those in a European market.

Its UK version (http://keywordspy.co.uk) similarly offers to the Brit advertising community the services it provides to Americans:

•    Tested keywords for online advertising campaign
•    Web domains/competitors' websites for market research purposes
•    List of business opponents or competitors
•    An access of the ONLY search engine tool that has the most comprehensive keyword database with over billion entries and more
•    User-friendly interface
•    100% accurate results and easy-to-download information
•    24/7 client support
•    A great exposure for your business thru popular search engine websites (Yahoo, MSN and Google)


After the major launch, about a thousand British search marketers have tried out the service that KeywordSpy offers and 99% agreed to the efforts of today’s most popular keyword tool through subscription.

“We collect uncompressed log files from the Internet Service Providers. From these we extract the keywords from the major engines including Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google and other databases, so it’s a no- no for us to be inaccurate,” KeywordSpy’s Rey Castler concluded during the SEO Conference.

Dozens of keyword tools proliferated nowadays in the market, but two of the most talked and raging in SEO forums and blogs are Wordtracker and KeywordSpy.
To gauge these tools’ individual potential, I subscribed to them and did a couple of tests and runs to prove their worth in keyword research. Allow me to enumerate the things I found out.

Obviously, the monthly subscription for Wordtracker ($49.36) is almost half-lower than KeywordSpy ($89.95). If price was the only determining edge, Wordtracker would be the preferred system. If you’re on a budget, Wordtracker is the obvious choice since it’s less than half the price of KeywordSpy. It also has flexible pricing schemes that allow you to subscribe for about $8 for a day or $250 for a year.

But if you are test and analyze the results with reality (like testing in Google), it will surely appear that KeywordSpy has more accurate keyword data, more frequent updates than WordTracker. Also, if you are to compare the interface, KeywordSpy is more user-friendly and well-designed. Oh, I like the blue theme of the site! (Excuse the personal comment, anyway).

Going back to the discussion, Wordtracker helps you find related terms and keyword phrases by offering a built-in Thesaurus and Lateral Search. The Lateral Search allows you to look at keywords which are thought to be related to your market or industry. But then, KeywordSpy has features such as PPC (estimated cost per click), Ad Rank and Competitor Count which are valuable factors in gauging the effectiveness of keywords. And surely, Wordtracker doesn’t give competitor keywords which KeywordSpy boasts in its byline.

The KeywordSpy Gold Membership Account offers their subscribers 2000 keyword and domain queries and 50,000 exports per day. It’s nearly impossible to hit that limit in one day, unless you are to build your own keyword tool on top of it that provides some automated queries. In other words, you will probably never hit the daily limit with KeywordSpy. But then, the Wordtracker allows API keyword research access, which KeywordSpy doesn’t provide.
Both keyword tools offer a Free Trial for you to test their respective services. So for those of you who are curious you can do a dry run, but then of course their free trial is always a limited access.
WordTracker only grabs data from MetaCrawler and Dogpile (a couple meta search engines) making KeywordSpy better for it pulls down its keyword data from major search engines and databases. Since Wordtracker only gather data from small groups of the World Wide Web, their data sampling errors are magnified. Sometimes they will make low volume terms seem more important than they are, and other times some terms will not show up.
Also, Wordtracker’s exclusive country keywords is limited to United Kingdom region, compare to KeywordSpy, which (aside from UK) has a set of regional databases- US, Canada, Australia and South Africa. And just recently, I noticed that KeywordSpy launched its graphical representation of PPC Competition in certain regions which means they are really into integration of ground breaking features.
Although, the Lateral and Thesaurus Search make Wordtracker a brilliant tool, prior to the writing of this, I decided to settle with my subscription to KeywordSpy, because the competitors’ keywords I dig through the site are trove of treasures that bring lots of conversions for my sites.

In the past months, there are claims that the well-known KeywordSpy is a reseller of KeyCompete. To check the veracity of the alleged buzz, I decided to sign-up to both systems and compared their respective services. After a series of tests, I boldly claim via this post that KeywordSpy is far superior than KeyCompete.

For those who are dying to disagreement with my claim, give me some minutes to explain.

Both tools let you search either by domain or by keyword. So, you may take a peep on what keywords a particular site is bidding on, or alternatively you may see what sites are bidding on a particular set of keywords, but KeywordSpy’s database is definitely bigger and more updated, plus, they have local databases for UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and South Africa, and they have promised to include the European market in the coming months.

First, I used both systems to search for top advertisers of the keyword “tents” and grabbed their keywords lists. I produced a list of about 8,000 from KeyCompete and another 8,000 for KeywordSpy and stopped because I have this short attention span. Well, anyways, I imported my keywords, setup my campaign in AdWords, sat back, and waited for results. I am happy to report that in just weeks, I tripled my ROI with the keyword lists I made with KeywordSpy while those I chose from KeyCompete seemed to be rubbish. As far as business goes, KeywordSpy is really brilliant.

Also, if you are to test the KeyCompete service using your own domains or websites, you will surely conclude that many of their results are equally short and inaccurate. Add to that, its pricing scheme by subdomain is outrageous!

Moreover, when I get all my assumed “competitors’ keywords” from KeyCompete, there is no way for me to know whether they are really good keywords. Their “Column Rating” feature is an underdog, compare to KeywordSpy’s Ad Ranking, PPC and Competitor Count features. Man, no way for you to get totally accurate PPC reports with KeyCompete.

And this is what killed me --- their e-mail support! The KeyCompete support took a week to reply to my question and the answer is too far away from my question, and it seems that the reply is just a copy-pasted portion of texts from their website. The KeywordSpy Team, on the other hand, is very helpful and knowledgeable to deal with. They even appreciated the feature suggestions I made. And aside from their pie and bar graphs that represent the PPC Summary or competition level among certain regions, they also have the ClickBank affiliate search engine which gives affiliates the real competition landscape at ClickBank. And I have heard from my SEO buddy Chris that KeywordSpy is into integration of Organic Keywords and Backlink result! Whew! This is amazing! KeyCompete really “can’t compete” with KeywordSpy.

So this post is a cautionary reminder to everyone, I have found no better service from KeyCompete. I actually cancelled my subscription to them after a month trial. Their service is none other than… poor.

tolits

to tolits