Submitting Articles

[vahsi000]

Most of us here know that submitting articles to places like ezine (or whatever, can't remember the one i use) is part of seo. My question is, are these articles that have been submitted unique or an article from your own website. I was thinking if there is 2 articles (one on your own website and the other on an ezine website) when spiders crawl the web and report back to search engines like google, wouldn't that have a negative effect?

[Chris]

I'm a firm believer in keeping your content unique. Having unique content is the greatest asset for a content site.

So, my advice is to simply write two versions of the articles you want to syndicate. One to share, and one to keep.

[vahsi000]

Here's a scenario (although something like this won't happen anytime soon, it's good to know): I write another dozen reviews on mmorpg's then someone comes along and just copies the reviews to their own template. I have text on the bottom of each page stating "copyrighted to vahsi000 2005-2006", just like any rip-artist he neither takes notice. My first question, does that text at the bottom of the page have any use in this situation and whats stopping the scammer to claim that the articles are 100% his or even that he bought it?

[KLB]

I have to echo what Chris has said. It is very imporant to keep the content on your website unique and one should never allow others to republish articles one has put on one's own site. One should also never use articles from article mills that simply results in one generating duplicate content.

I go so far to protect the uniqueness of my own content that when I commission an article to be written, I purchase exclusive rights to said articles. I am also very agressive about tracking down and getting removed unauthorized copies of my articles. My number one concern is that my articles never get penalized as duplicate content.

[Chris]

With things like Google's cache or Archive.org you can prove you published an article first. of course the best protection is registering a copyright, but that isn't always feasible for casual writings like say blog posts.

[KLB]

Personally I do not allow archive.org to access my site (I block them via my .htaccess file) in part because they don't truly respect the robots.txt file. While they might not allow archived pages to be visible to the public if their bot is denied via the robots.txt file, they still index all pages they can get to.

I do make filings with the U.S. Copyright office and as long as you have made a filing within three months of creating a work (e.g. article or blog entry) you are given full protections even if the copyright violation came within that three month window.