Article Rewriting For Article Marketing

In my last post I discussed article marketing for blog promotion and I talked about how to choose which posts make good candidates and how to turn them into suitable articles. However there was one thing that I didn’t cover which TJ from Smart Blog Tips raised in the comments and that is the subject of rewriting the article to avoid duplication issues.

This post is the fourth in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

What is Duplication?

Try this exercise – go to Google and paste in the following search with the quotes “How to Properly Clean a Freshwater Fish Tank”. This will bring up a handful of articles written by Josh Spaulding for his experiment comparing squidoo to article marketing. However, scroll down to the bottom of the search results (it helps to have 100 results per page for this) and you will see a message something along the lines of:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 8 already displayed.”

Underneath this message there is a link to repeat the search with the extra results included. Click this and you’ll find a whole bunch more links to the same article on different sites. What is happening here is that Google recognises the content of all these articles as being the same so when you do the initial search it just chooses a handful of them to show you. The others are still there and yes the links do count but there is one problem for bloggers with this situation…

You have no control over which version of the article Google is going to choose to show in its initial search results. Real searchers will not click that link to show the full results – only us webmasters do that! The danger here is that if you are using article marketing to promote a relatively young blog it is possible that the articles you submit to the stronger directories such as EzineArticles will actually be shown rather than the original post on your blog! You want your article marketing efforts to serve your blog, not compete against it.

Of course if you are writing fresh content for your articles then this is simply not an issue but the technique I described in my previous post specifically encourages you to re-use your existing blog content so this could become a very real problem.

How Much Rewriting Is Necessary?

This is the big question and there is no black and white answer because it is just a massive shade of grey. At one extreme you would simply substitute the odd word here and there throughout the article so you may change ’strategy’ into ‘tactic’ for example. However 99% of the article would still be the same. Google’s algorithm is good enough to detect this as the same article.

The ultimate solution would to literally rewrite the article from scratch making every word different. That is simply not practical if you want to submit to tens or hundreds of directories!

The theory is that each article needs to have about 30% of its content to be different from another one to be considered unique. However this is entirely dependent on Google and their algorithm which can change at any time.

The problem really boils down to the submission process. I use a subscription based service called Unique Article Wizard (more on article submission in the next post in the series) which does something funky internally to turn your original article into hundreds or even thousands of versions that are unique enough to fool Google’s algorithm. However, at $67 a month, I suspect most of you reading this won’t be using their service.

A good way to get an idea of whether or not your article is unique enough is to use a website called Copyscape. If you have already published your article you can enter the URL of either the article or the original blog post and Copyscape will look for duplicates. You can also sign up for a premium version which for $0.05 a search will allow you to check if your content is duplicate before you publish it.

Article Spinning

Another solution is to use something called article spinning. This is a technique that allows you to automate the word substitution technique that I mentioned above. It takes a little while to setup each article – you have to embed some syntax into the article to allow the software to work. The advantage here is that if you take the time to put in lots of substitutions, the software can create lots of different versions of your article – enough for all the directories, however it is still not ideal…

Firstly, even changing words in this way leaves the basic article structure the same. Google is getting better and better at detecting this. Secondly, the resulting articles often have very odd sounding language which doesn’t read too well for humans. This isn’t too much of a problem if you’re doing some article marketing to boost an anonymous niche site but if you’re doing it to promote your blog then you will give yourself a bad name and you’ll make yourself look like a terrible writer!

I’m not sure of any free spinners, I know of one called Jet Spinner which is popular but they also now charge a monthly fee and I much prefer what Unique Article Wizard does.

The Solution For Bloggers?

If you’re using article marketing to promote your blog and you’re going to be having your real name on your articles then I really don’t recommend article spinning. However, don’t panic about the duplicate content filter – as long as you do ONE rewrite of your blog post for the article directories and make sure that article is sufficiently different from your blog post you should be ok.

Then you can submit that same article to as many directories as you want. Yes most of them will find their way into that duplicate content filter and not be shown in the search results but the links still count and your blog post should still be ranking so it’s not too important.

Tweet This Post Stumble This Post