SEO Consultants - Myths
You don't need unique content?
"I can just get copies of articles from an article directory such as www.articlealley.com and place them on my site and that will help me get high rankings."
Accordingly this fable addresses the blazing hot 'duplicate content penalty'. A few folks claim it does not exist, some do.
However let us take a step back and truly establish 'duplicate content penalty' before we go any further.
Personally, when I build a website and make an effort to optimise it for the major search engines, I need it to rank high. If it does not rank high then I consider that a kind of penalty!
Low rankings equates to bad in my opinion and bad goes along with the word 'penalty' fairly well.
I understand Google's not going to come knocking on my door and give me a duplicate content ticket. But I do understand that I may end up with lower rankings for it.
Let me clarify...
All those folks distributing this particular myth that you don't need unique content to rank well are really not thinking this through pragmatically.Someone has to rank first, so if you take an article that's already on dozens of different sites and you put it on yours, which site's going to get the #1 ranking when the target keywords are typed into the search engine?
Are you 100% sure that it's going to be YOUR website even though this precise, identical content is now spread about all over?
Probably not...
Let's say you're in the business consulting market. If you go to ezinearticles.com (a depository for articles on all different topics) and you collect all the articles on business consulting, put them on your site and do a little backlinking, do you really think you're going to suddenly dominate the search engines for business consulting related keywords?Sorry, but it doesn't exactly work that way.
You would have to do an insane amount of backlinking to make up for the fact that the content on your site can be found all over the place.
In fact, it would be less work to get unique articles written up just for your site.
For one, if you write the content you'll be able to control exactly which keywords you want to target on your pages. If you use articles that are pre-written, you're stuck with whatever you get.
For another, the search engines want the best sites to come up #1.
That way their users are happy.
Your site with all these copied articles doesn't really have a whole lot to offer.
How in the world can it be the best site when you don't have anything new to add?
Although high rankings with duplicate content can be possible, when unique, fresh content is so easy to outsource why would you make things so hard on yourself?
There are writers who will go out and research your topic and write you a great article on whatever you want for like $12. You can even specify which keywords you want them to include so most of the time consuming work is already done for you.
And you don't even need that many articles to start getting high rankings. Five is a good start for a really small site. I like to have a little more than that, but if you can't afford to outsource it just write the articles yourself.
How long does it take to write 5 pages of good content?
You could do that instead of watching a movie.
That way you control the keyphrases you're optimizing your pages for and it's unique so you have something to offer instead of just using articles that were sent out to thousands of article directories. Instead of just recycling content and then organizing it altogether, you've got a real asset.