This post was originally posted Nov 7, 2006 – I have added a screenshot as the original subject site is no longer online – it is still just as relevant today as it was over 3 years ago. In places I have added some additional commentary or expanded on original ideas.

References to PageRank should be looked on as synonymous with Google Juice & overall site authority, and not just green pixels in a toolbar, though that can be a good visual indicator at times.

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

I followed a link from Digg a few minutes a go, read the story, and as I frequently do on any site I visit, I snooped around a little.

I actually do exactly the same every time someone writes a blog post referring to me and pings my blog. It is the polite thing to do, and maybe I can add something to the conversation. It also allows me to relate any comment to the person who is writing about me, either positively or negatively. Everyone is entitled to opposing views. What is often important is why they have an opposing view, and it isn’t always obvious.

Now about the site in question:

1. I have only read half of one article there, so I don’t know much about the site contents
2. The reason I am linking through to the site is purely from an SEO point of view
3. This is a very common problem, very easy to make, and honestly not too hard to correct.

With that said, here is the site Kerry Fox Live (Archive.org link – the site seems to have been offline for 2 years.)

Initial Site Analysis

So the first thing I notice is that it is a PR3 site.

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

A large proportion of the content is duplicate syndicated content from services such as Associated Press, without any wrapping

But the site has been around for 16 months

You can make a splog, chuck duplicate content at it, and get a PR4 or PR5 after a few months.

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

At a guess (I am seriously not going to count them all), only 20% of the links on any given page point to an internal page. (yes that sidebar is on every page)
There are 2 blogrolls, one of which seems to be websites and blogs he likes, and the other is a whole load of press related sites… news sources.

Every single one of those links is a live external link leaking PageRank to other sites. Those other sites are not reciprocating in any way.

Now I am sure someone is likely to point out that those links provide a service for visitors, and maybe add a little authenticity to the site.

What visitors?

We are looking at a news site with an Alexa rank of close to 2M – not 2k, but 2M

Now there are times you want to sacrifice a little page rank to other sites, especially if they are reciprocating, sharing visitors, or in the case of my blog, I like visitors commenting and joing my “community”. You might also do it in a carefully controlled way from a mininet to one of your own sites.

Solutions

Get rid of the blogroll on all internal pages. It is giving away too much traffic to other sites, not to mention PageRank.

Add nofollow to all the blogroll links that are not reciprocating, or you don’t want to be overly friendly with. (Update August 2010 I would probably tend to use javascript in some way)

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

• Recent posts – 10 links
• Top Posts – 10 links
• Recent Comments – 5 – 10 links
• Tagging + Tag Cloud – 50+ links
• There wouldn’t be a need for as much internal ball linking if there wasn’t so many external leaks. The site is gaining very few comments.
• Related posts – 5-10 links
• Related reviews – 5-10 links
• Glossary links

Emphasis should be placed on the links you wish visitors to traverse

External Linking

The site has 2 visible external links to the front page. I am not sure how many to internal pages, but even if it did have external links, any PR given would immediate leak.

Just syndicating one article will generate loads of backlinks, far in excess of what you can achieve with a single blog post (unless you have 100k+ readers). Based on my analysis of “A” list bloggers, their average blog post might normally generate around 10 backlinks (showing in Google).

(update August 2010: – whilst many of the bloggers I analysed in 2006 have 10x as many subscribers by RSS & email now, the number of links they receive, other than from splogs & social media probably hasn’t increased)

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

If you have 100 external links on every page of your site, you need lot of internal links to retain some (hopefully most) of your PageRank, and it would certain help if those people you give a link to on your sidebar reciprocate in some manner.

(please note that includes me – don’t put a link in your blogroll to my site – sure I appreciate the links, but I would much prefer just an occasional mention in your blog)

If you can’t get a reciprocal link, use nofollow, (August 2010 – blocked external javascript), or stick them on their own seperate page so they don’t suck your own site dry.

And finally… this site structure plagues a huge proportion of blogs. Other blog owners who do not have this problem, quite likely don’t even realise why.

Further reading:

Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow

Update: whilst I am still a fan of article marketing, I no longer recommend any service that doesn’t provide a way to have unique passwords for each distribution site.

This is also something that affects bloggers who syndicate their content, and anyone undertaking article marketing.

New Terms

Article or blog post titles are effectively “new terms” to the search engines, in a very similar way to the names of hot new products, for instance “Day Job Killer“.

What normally happens for a specific new term is that the top of the Google search results are in a constant state of flux, with newly discovered information on more trusted domains garnering the top spots.

Thus if you publish a blog post, and it gets syndicated, quoted by others, appears on a social bookmarking site, etc, then there is a high chance that a few days after you published, even for a specific title, you will be nowhere in sight in the search results unless your own website has enough authority to retain a spot near the top, or gets indexed quickly.

Backlinks

For your original title to bubble to the top, the search engines generally need some help, and you can help your content do this:-

• On your own site by ensuring your content doesn’t get buried in your archives. 2 clicks from the front page is good, 3 clicks is pretty much the limit
• Within the syndicated content by ensuring that the syndicated content has a link back to your original content
• Gaining deep links from other websites to your content – I am not going to write a guide on linkbaiting

Chicken and Egg Situation

Very much like I described with the Wikipedia Nofollow situation, and correct attribution, if you don’t have links back to your original content from what is syndicated, or if other websites write about what you discovered, and don’t link back to you as a source, there is no path for the search engines to follow.

Even if you do have links back to you, that doesn’t mean that a few hours, or even a few days after you publish the story, that you will rank highly as being the original source, unless you have a huge amount of authority, or an insane amount of links coming in from authority sources. In fact the last bit is speculation – there might be a certain threshold of links that can tip the balance earlier than the 5 days from Bill Hartzer’s experiment.

Blog Syndication Example

A few days ago I had an exclusive story regarding coComment Technorati integration. I had all the details because I was involved with the original suggestion, and it is so powerful, as I am sure the people whose blogs I comment at must be realising, that it will eventually become a huge benefit to a lot of people.

I thought the story was good enough to spend some time with presentation, lots of screenshots and even adding a few financial details at the end to please technology bloggers.

I then dropped an email to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, because I knew he had covered coComment in the past, and always attributes the original source. It also wasn’t the first time I had contact with him, because I once pipped him on an upgrade to Pageflakes by a few minutes, he left a friendly comment, so I knew he was approachable.
Pete included a post about coComment later in the day.

Paul O’Flahery also wrote about coComment linking through to me, and even kindly Digged the story.

So lets take a look at the search results for “cocomment technorati” after a couple of days.

Some notes in addition to the dialogue I have in the screenshot:-

• Whilst Mashable didn’t break the story, they currently have much more authority than me, and it is also likely that the search engines discovered the story on their site first.
• The Money Blogs probably has a similar authority to my own, but might have the edge on age of the domain, as I have only been up and running for 3 months here (though the 2 redirects I have from old sites might also give some age authority)
• The first mention of Paul’s original post in the Google SERPs is on the 3rd page – it just happens to be one of his tag pages ;)
• I have written about the Rojo Splog situation in the past.

I don’t expect that particular result to bubble up above Mashable, although changing the title of the page, and tweaking a few more things here will certainly help. Lots of links to it will probably help as well but that is never something you can count on but are always appreciated.

Article Syndication Examples

In my fairly recent post describing my article marketing tactics, and how mass distribution of articles still works, I highlighted an article and how it currently appears in the search results. A couple of weeks later things have moved around a fair bit in Google.

In some ways as I mentioned in my article marketing post, I didn’t do things correctly with that article, as I didn’t have a link back to the source. It took a while for the article to bubble to the top, and to be honest I am surprised it did, and it is mainly because of the emphasis I place on distributing my google juice within my site with links to older content, and my extensive use of tagging.

I recently wrote a second article to act as an introduction to article marketing, and in a way to dispel some of the FUD I read frequently about spinning articles for better backlinks from “unique” content. In many ways spinning multiple versions of an article can be harmful, because then you are syndicating unique variations of the original, and you need a link back to your original to have any chance of bubbling to the top.

You will notice that after a couple of weeks it is securely holding top spot. Part of the reason is the more content I build around a single subject, the more it reinforces itself with the deep linking I use in the posts, and with my tagging.
Also of huge importance is that I linked back to where the article was posted on my blog from the author credits, thus helping the search engines to quickly work out the origin.

One thing I don’t do as well as I possibly could is titles – I think too much like an SEO rather than a marketer at times, but that might work against me. The more people read an article, the higher chance for distribution, and the more chance I will gain additional reader of a particular post here on my blog, and again get links and comments. Hopefully Michel Fortin is going to class that article worthy of a headline makeover after his generous recent offer.

Alex, a new reader actually proved my article marketing strategy much better than I ever could. The owner of an article directory is a very good target audience for a lot of people, and there are thousands of people running article directories, or feeding articles to blogs. They read articles, and often visit the sites of the authors.
Alex proved that today by visiting here, and commenting:-

Absolutely agree that articles are seeds of knowledge. I run my own article directory and during the process of approving new articles often catch myself in deep reading of different subjects that in other way I would never look for.
Thanks for your good site.

There was recently quite a lot of discussion within the Bumpzee community regarding followable links from the syndicated content. Mark wanted his content to rank on his blog, there was a long discussion on Vlads blog, and Dane picked it up in a discussion on Bupzee.

This post in part is intended to demonstrate how syndication can work. The search engines do eventually work things out. Syndication mostly doesn’t hurt how your content ranks long-term, as long as you have a link back to the source.
If you don’t have a link back to the source, it takes much longer for your content to bubble to the top, and it will only do that if your archives have more juice than the archives on the syndication site.
If you have a brand new site, and a PR10 site links to you and somehow ranks for your domain name for the next 6 months, be glad, because whilst you might be losing out on your domain name, you are also benefiting overall. To counteract that, if a few other sites also link to you, the search engines will work things out much faster.
In addition, on syndication sites content normally gets buried very fast, in the same way as content can get buried quickly on poorly optimized blogs.

The free ebook is based around spinning multiple copies of the same article, and submitting these “unique” articles as widely as possible.

I personally don’t believe in the value of article spinning to try to create “unique” content, even if it is based upon your own material. The ebook concentrates mainly on manual submission, and personal approaches to having your article listed on niche websites.

Whilst it does suggest deep linking, there is no mention of deep linking to the original version of your article on your own site.

It is however a useful second opinion to my own article marketing strategy, the one-time offer might be useful for someone wanting to experiment with a different approach to the one I recommend, and it is free to download (well you have to give up your email address)

I am intrigued about the mystery bonus, so this is a referral link or here is a plain link.

Does your mind wander when you are doing a physical job that doesn’t require much other thought? Mine certainly does.

Duplicate Content of Biblical Proportions

I have been doing some research of “Top 10 Lists” for a new site. Whilst no list of the top 10 best selling books is exactly the same, there is one common feature. Every single top 10 list states that The Bible in all its variations has sold more than 6 billion copies.
That is close to the current world population, estimated by the CIA to be 6,525,170,264 (July 2006 est.)
Thus there are probably as many bibles in the world as people

That is an awful lot of duplicate content

Gideons

Gideons is an interesting organisation, whose work is evangelism and distribution of the bible. You will see Gideons bibles in every hotel room, and I was given a Gideons bible whilst at school in addition to a larger bible I was issued for Religious Education lessons.

With the help of the Gideons organisation, whenever you need a bible, there is one close at hand.

Spread the Word

This is a fundamental concept in all religion, not just Christian. It is not enough to have the knowledge and faith, you are also meant to pass it onto other people. Lots of the time the knowledge will fall on deaf ears. If the knowledge is out there, and easy to find even without specifically looking for it, such as in a hotel room drawer, it has a benefit.

Worthwhile Duplicate Content

I am sure many of those 6 billion bibles are in dusty attics, unused drawers, or buried at the back on shelves, long forgotten. Every now and then one copy gets rediscovered, unearthed or brought out of hiding.

The Bible and Duplicate Content

A church is not the only place you can find a copy of the bible. I am sure many religious people read more of the bible while in church than the cumulative total of all other places, but that doesn’t make it pointless to have multiple copies in your home, school, library and even hotel rooms. All those copies of the bible are seeds, and every now and then one of those seeds gets picked up and begins to germinate, wherever the seed is located.

Your Articles and Duplicate Content

I recently wrote a mammoth blog post on my philosophy with article marketing. Many marketing experts believe that article marketing no longer works, or you should be highly selective where you publish your content.

I mentioned a strategy, that as long as you link back to the original source for your content that people can follow, it makes sense to spread your article as widely as possible.
I don’t discount special publishing deals that will bring your article to the forefront of thousands of people, but that opportunity is often reserved for established writers.

Articles Are Seeds of Knowledge

Spread your articles far and wide. Sometimes they will land in fertile soil, and germinate and grow almost immediately. Whilst I wouldn’t dare liken EzineArticles to a church, it certainly is very fertile ground for your seeds to grow.

Some of your articles will almost certainly end up landing on less fertile ground, or buried deep in a website long forgotten. It is a seed that hasn’t germinated yet, but one day it might be uncovered and grow into a tree bearing fruit.

Sometimes your article may end up on even more unsavoury territory, with a link to you not being provided, or even worse plagiarised. It will happen, such is the nature of people. If the purpose of your article was to help people more than market yourself, then it really doesn’t matter if occasionally the link to you is broken. A person reading your article is still going to look for further knowledge on the subject, and eventually find their way to respected sources of information, such as yourself, just as someone picking up a Gideon’s bible might eventually find their way to a church.

If you don’t sow your seeds, they don’t have a chance to grow

This Started Off As a Comment

This article started off as a comment I was writing over on Brian’s post at CopyBlogger on Linking Strategies That Work.

Brian asked me…

Andy, does that brute force article marketing with affiliate program stuff still work? Haven’t done any of that in ages.

Article Marketing is Dead?

I was going to use that as the title, but that is a worn out record
Many experts would argue that article marketing as a form of website promotion died sometime during 2006. Search Engines began discounting the link equity from the articles that were published en-mass, and many gave up with article distribution.

Selective Article Marketing is Alive

Another group of experts would proclaim that article syndication works well, but you should be highly selective about how you distribute your articles.

This is for a number of reasons including:-

1. Many of the top article directories started to use nofollow in the links to author websites.

This is actually fairly serious and potentially unethical as I will discuss later.

2. There is no point having an article posted on a website that very few people visit other than to post articles.
3. It takes longer to publish articles to 500 article directories than to write 4 new articles, and publish them to the top 10 article directories that do give you traffic. This only really applies if you are submitting by hand or software.
4. I have recently read one top article writer state that he gets so much traffic from submitting to one article directories, he couldn’t cope with more
5. Being able to offer more exclusivity

For some great commentary on this approach, this thread on the EzineArticles blog is a very good read. Article Submission: – 1 to 200 or 200 to 1 (added 2 keywords to the link)

Blog Syndication

When you write something on your blog, and hit publish, your blogging software sends out a ping using xml-rpc to the sites you request it to do so. If your blogging system doesn’t notify lots of sites, it is usually recommended that you use a service such as Pingomatic to re-ping additional sites.

Lists of sites you can ping, that are updated regularly, are one of the most popular items that bloggers search for.

If you are using WordPress there used to be quite a delay if you had a long list of sites you ping every time you made a post, but those problems are long gone.

You won’t find anyone recommending that you ping less sites because having your content listed on more sites is bad for you. As long as the content links back to the original source, everything is cool.

Reblogs, Shared Feeds and Splogs

Touchy subject among many, but depending on copyright most people are happy with their work being syndicated in some way, as long as the sites link back to the original source. Some who don’t allow commercial use of their full content would insist on a site using an excerpt, and many rebloggers do this by default because of this.

The biggest shame is that many of these reblogs are not very well SEO optimized, and that whilst the domain might achieve a PR5 mainly from internal linking, the content doesn’t really achieve a great deal of worth. Such a reblog would quite often use a single link to pass PR from the home page or a very short blogroll on a sitemap page. They could do a lot better, both for themselves and for the sites whose content they use.

Pareto

I am going to link to Wikipedia entries as many people will already have an understanding of the Pareto Principle and various 80-20 rule permutations.

But that is just one theory we have to thank Pareto for, there is also:-

Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an important notion in neoclassical economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences. Given a set of alternative allocations and a set of individuals, a movement from one allocation to another that can make at least one individual better off, without making any other individual worse off, is called a Pareto improvement or Pareto optimization. An allocation of resources is Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal when no further Pareto improvements can be made.

If you ensure you are not worse off from whatever form of syndication you undertake, and it might add some benefit elsewhere, it should be considered, as long as it doesn’t take up too much time.

Submitting For Editorial Review

The majority of the article directories have some level of editorial review, and if they are smart, a selection process. They choose how they accept articles, which articles they publish, and how those articles are presented to the public.

Websites that are well optimized and “niched” that use 100% duplicate content can still gain search engine traffic, and provide a worthwhile user experience.

I suppose I should give you proof of that: Technorati

Ok so Technorati have an unfair advantage in the ranking wars with millions of bloggers giving them free links to every term imaginable. No matter how discounted the duplicate content is, the massive amount of links just can’t be ignored. Plus it is a useful service – I just prefer to link to my own tag pages.

Here is another example, mainly linked to with the aid of article marketing, just one single article well over one year ago.

It has also received 2 links from my old blog, and as the content is now on this blog, those are counting as well. Actually this test site used to be PR4, that has dropped down to PR3 over the last 4 months, but then it hasn’t been gaining that many new links, there is only one article in circulation for it.

The site in question: keyword-report.blogspot.com

I have deliberately not changed it for over a year, and I am deliberately not adding another link to it from this post. I would appreciate it is you don’t link to it as it is a useful test site.

Here is some recent search activity (in the last 2 weeks)

That site is almost 100% duplicate content other than the first 5 or so posts. I have used a little wrapping in places.

The funny thing is at one time that blog used to have some real subscribers, so people must have liked the article selection. Article Miner is no longer on sale, but the creators do have a few other systems available. BlogAutoPublisher can do a lot more these days, and I will probably show an example site sometime… I have promised that before as well, we will see.

The site isn’t doing any harm to normal searchers, it is ranking for SEO related terms that a small number of people search for, plus some misspellings.

Ok moving on…

SEO and Linking Structures

One of the factors that affect relevance for certain terms these days is how pages are interlinked. That is one of the reasons blogs can rank so well for various terms, because you can link to related content so easily, both on your own site, and on the sites of others.

A smart article directory or niche website that is using duplicate content is going to include links to related terms from within the content, using CSS to change the representation on screen. That additional content doesn’t necessarily have to be included within the content feeds, but if you can manage it, it is a good idea.
Most often used are snippets to other articles that are relevant, or providing tips.
This changes keyword density, adds LSI related terms, and also allows you to provide a link through to related content without making live links on words written by the original author which is a grey area.

Using tables or CSS you can also shuffle blocks of content. That was written 15 months ago. It is possible to totally scramble the order of phrases in an article, and then stick them back together using CSS for display on the screen. You don’t need to go that far yet.

Original Author

Search Engines will try to determine the source of an article. Just because it is published first on one site, doesn’t mean Google or any other site will look on it as being the origin.

Here is a bad recent example to demonstrate this theory

A short while ago I published a single article on this blog

“Lifelong Customers From Sharing Your Knowledge”

Here is a quoted search for it on Google

It is in the articles category all by itself, not too far from the front page, so it won’t get devalued too much.
Here is a screen shot to give this post some longevity, as SERPs change.

A few days later I submitted it to ArticleMarketer. I had some problems with links in the body of the article, and Article Marketer were having growing pains among other things thus it took a while to be resolved. It was mainly me being stubborn, I could have got it out of the door faster, but I thought the solution proposed by their editors was a little unethical.

Now when you do a search for an article, and see lots of references, don’t get too excited. With all the snippets out there, articles published with no link or a nofollow, duplicate content on the same site, and refeeds of excerpts from article directories that point only to the article directory (even the biggest are guilty of that), you can normally cross off a zero for real backlinks.

You will see that this site isn’t being listed first. The article here is slightly different, it was wrapped with some additional text, and in the article itself there are differences because of those links and a small block of text, but I don’t think that makes a difference.

You see I didn’t link back to the source – I used one of my 2 links from the author resource box to the service I was giving a strong recommendation for. It is a shame I couldn’t include them in the body.
This was also before Google confirmed they use these links back to the source as helping in determining duplicate content origin. I had asked the question in the comments over at Matt Cutt’s blog previously without a response.

I would have given you an example of how the article helped for the referred site to rank. I did see a jump from 7th place in Google up to 1st, but they also made some changes to their own linking structure which might have helped.

But did you notice something about the Google SERPS?

ArticlesTree is a WordPress Blog, with a reasonable page structure and none of the content is any deeper than a couple of links from the front page.
It seems to be a new site, and from the looks of things they have been doing some work in building links… or dumping some dollars into it.
I am almost 100% sure that Articlestree.com is sourcing all their content from Article Marketer, and having the articles fed directly in, based on category.

It is amazing to see a site ranking higher than EzineArticles.com for a particular article title, which just goes to show that it is possible.

If an article directory isn’t linking back to the original source with a followable link, the search engines get confused, and determine by themselves which article version is most relevant. That can be based on a number of factors. If you link back to the page on your website where the original article is located, that helps the search engines, and gives you more credibility as being the originator. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will outrank Wikipedia, but it gives you more chance.

Brute Force Article Marketing

It works, but you have to do it the right way

I wouldn’t go to the effort of writing content purely for article syndication. I would always post it on my own site first.

Some content is ideal for further syndication such as Top 7 and Top 10 lists and short “How Tos” on all types of subjects.
700 to 1000 words is currently looked on as the ideal length for articles, though some publishers prefer shorter articles.

Here are some steps I would suggest

1. Select some suitable content for syndication – it can be some of your older content
2. the best content to use might be the content that already has a fair number of links. You might thing it unwise to syndicate your best, most popular content, but it has the highest chance of being picked up for a newsletter, and no one is going to beat you for long tail searches on that content. At the same time, the more links that content gets, the more pagerank and relevance it can pass onto other pages, making them stronger
3. Edit the content –
• Article directories have different specific rules about linking out and self serving links
• You might want to change your paragraph formatting – remember your article might appear in emails
• no affiliate links with messy URLs, although many allow you to use a registered root domain as a redirect… even the top directories
• create a footer that contains a deep link to your original content, plus I would suggest a link through to a money page, squeeze page or secondary site. Based on my tracking, a large number of interested customers will look at your home page anyway after visiting a deeplink.
• Submit articles everywhere you can – yes that is controversial
• Most of the sites provide you a backlink – it might not be much, but it all helps
• Most sites have an editor checking submissions – look on an editor of an article directory as being a subscriber. If you submit to 500 or 1000 article directories, that is 500 or 1000 readers. A blog with that many subscribers would be looked on as successful
• The more articles you submit based on your blog content, the stronger your internal pages will become, thus although from day one some article directories might outrank you, that won’t last forever, as you are gaining links in other ways as well.
• Think of Articlestree.com – blogs are often much better optimized than article directories. They are ideal niche websites – many you can’t submit to manually – if they are ranking strongly for your content, they might also pass on more link juice of various kinds.
• A year ago, if you searched for “Andy Beard” in Google, my Ezine Articles profile would have been in around 5th spot in the SERPs – it is now 13th and soon to be overtaken by my Disclosure Policy Plugin site, which has hardly any links other than from this site

I talked about Pareto – syndicating your content shouldn’t take up a lot of time. Your blog does it automatically.

I prefer to use the services of a company like Article Marketer, though there are other services. It takes me 5 minutes to re-purpose a blog post into an article for redistribution.

I don’t opt for the software route, rotating author boxes, rotating paragraphs or heaven forbid some of the automatic article re-writing software currently available to supposedly create multiple unique version of the same article.
In my opinion that is too much hard work for very little gain. It can also give a “false positive” signal to the article directories. How are they to know whether the article you submit to them really was your own work, with some many other variations floating around the ether. Yes most will have the same author name, but the same tools are used frequently with private label rights articles or as a form of plagiarism.

Another way of looking at this, has anyone written a WordPress plugin that serves a different version of your blog posts to each blog search engine and blog archive site? Even if they did write one, would you really bother using it? I wouldn’t for sure.

I just received a contact request from Joe Beaulaurier of PRWeb. He had visited my blog, maybe liked what he read, and had also already joined my community. There is a fair chance he has also subscribed to my RSS feed.

I then visited his blog, see that he is talking about similar related subjects and I subscribe to his feed. I discuss a lot about article marketing especially in relation to using Article Marketer, which is very similar in many ways to the Press Release service offered by PR Web where Joe works.

If you take a look at his list of contact requests, you will see that most of them are industry related, people he might be expected to make connections with via other avenues, and people who would maybe want to make contact with him.

The next thing I noticed was that on his about page he has his LinkedIn button. Not one to pass up on growing my new LinkedIn network, I went searching for his email address to send him an invite to my network. For a marketing person, his email address was actually quite hard to find, but I got there in the end.

Another Rumour of MyBlogLog being aquired surfaced today on GigaOm, but his source seems to have pulled the article.

If I was MyBlogLog I wouldn’t sell. They are experiencing high growth and just need to clamp down on people exploiting the system. The invitation system just needs to be made automation proof.

My original article was Keywords, ranking and a little SEO fun. It is over 16 months old but still spreading.

Take a look at this website in Chineese (I am not sure which Chineese)

First impression, you can’t understand a word of it… correct?

Try moving your mouse over the article content – up pops the original English phrase.

I am not sure exactly how they are doing this, and technically translation can be looked on as an unauthorised modification of the original work, but honestly I don’t care.

The way they have done this is extremely smart, especially if they have used some form of machine translation. For any phrase that wasn’t translated correcty, there is an immediate reference to the original document.
In addition Google are picking up the live backlinks surrounded by English text.

This is a feature that translation services such as Google Translate need to make their translation more useful.

It is one of the most innovative uses I have ever seen for duplicate 3rd party content.

It should be noted that I didn’t write this article to stick on a tax consultation site, but maybe it will be picked up by them.

The primary intent is a demonstration of the power of sharing what knowledge you know freely. Eventually there will be some kind of financial transaction, that is even found acceptable in most religeous activities, although churches don’t actively display a pricelist for services available. (I did pay a little more than the suggested contribution to the Church where I got married 13 years ago).

You might also notice I am “wrapping” this article with its own introduction. I will also post something at the end to make it a little more unique.

Lifelong Customers From Sharing Your Knowledge

I just put down the phone (well actually we were talking on Skype) after a 30 minute discussion with my new tax advisor, and I am so overwhelmed by the integrity of the man I was speaking to, I felt I just had to write an article about my experience.

My prior experience with tax consultants had been tainted by poor advice, and in particular paying for an “expert” to research subjects in which he should already have a fair level of expertise.

~ A Little Prior History ~

As an example, at one of my previous companies, we were having some problems relating to corporate withholding tax, specifically in relation to licensing of computer games to publishers internationally.
We were already taking legal advice, and our legal firm had their own specialists. In an effort to do “due dilligence” we also approached a multinational tax consultation specialist for a second opinion.

A fee was fixed for this secondary consultation, and the information provided was totally unrelated to the problems we were facing.
After clarifying exactly what we were looking for, and negotiating another fee for in-depth research (they needed to consult partners in another office), we received an updated report on the action we should take.

This report was again useless to our current situation. They outlined a few possible scenarios about how we should arrange our financial relationships in future, without addressing our current problems, and without taking into account standard business practices in the computer games industry.

Fortunately our lawyers really did know what they were talking about, and their tax specialists were top rate. We won our legal and taxation dispute, and whilst I can’t remember exact figures, their action probably saved / recovered more than $300,000.

~ Back to the Present Day ~

I was looking for a personal tax advisor. My tax situation is quite complicated, thus I was looking for someone who could demonstrate they knew what they were talking about.

I wrote emails to 4 companies, and also one individual who ran a website providing information on tax law.

I started receiving email replies from the 4 companies. In every case, the companies asked further questions, mentioned their consulting fees if they were to undertake further research, and suggested they might be able to help me.

The individual who ran the website wrote back and said he was travelling, but would get back to me in a few days with a reply.

Now rather than continuing my conversation with the tax consultation companies, I waited for a reply from the gentleman who ran the website. Webmasters are quite often extremely busy, and my situation might require a fair amount of research.

A week or so later I followed up my initial equiry, and the next day I received an email reply that compared to the previous replies, gave me what I could only describe as a warm glow.

~ Share Your Knowledge ~

First of all I should point out that the webmaster was a highly qualified tax consultant in his own right. A true specialist, who had chosen to share his in-depth knowledge via a website rather than charge hefty consultation feeds.

The email he sent me provided valuable insights into my own situation. He still asked a multitude of questions so that he could refine his answer to me, but along with the questions, he also explained why it was important to provide the additional information.

Where possible, he gave specific examples of how different circumstances could affect my taxation situation.

He didn’t ask for any money (though on his website there is a clear suggestion of what type of fees to expect)

He suggested an immediate follow-up phone call to discuss my specific situation, and clarify certain facts.

~ Prove Your Expertise ~

There is no better way to win life-long customers than to give quality information for free.
During our phone conversation, he continued to share his knowledge and advice.
I was finally compelled to initiate a conversation to discuss fees or maybe a retainer. It hadn’t been discussed and he had already provided more information than I could reasonably expect for the small fees mentioned on his website.
He explained to me that he doesn’t work on a retainer. The only fee would be the modest one, and it would only be payable once he had submitted a full written report in a few days time.

~ How to Win Customers for Life ~

In whatever capacity this gentleman is able to help me in the future, he has already won a customer for life.
An initial consultation quite often takes up a lot more time than ongoing consultation to refine the initial strategy.

He has sacrificed a little time in order to assure me of his competence, and at the same time we have already established a good working relationship.

If you happen to need any form of tax advice in Poland, Artur M.Brzezinski websites include www.PIT.pl & www.VAT.pl, and he has details of polish tax advice in english

~ Conclusion ~

I hope this real life example demonstrates the power of sharing what you know, whether on your own website properties, via article syndication, or even a bricks & mortar establishment.

Andy Beard has worked in Sales, Marketing and Localization for the last 15 years, primarily in the computer games industry. He now spends his time creating content sites (niche marketing), and writing about the techniques he uses. He also provides WordPress Plugins for the popular blogging platform.

So now we have to add some closing wrapping text to ensure that this copy of the article is looked on as being slightly more unique than the 100s of other copies that will soon appear on the internet.

What I could also do is include some text in the middle of the article in a breakout box, maybe with some tips etc. That is very easy to do with CSS. It is one of the ways many of the latest niche site creator packages make content unique without changing the article itself.

I need to go through all my old content and get it all tagged so it is easy to find more information on duplicate content.

There is one sticking point on this article that I am not sure will pass through the “censors” at both Article Marketer and high quality article directories such as Ezine Articles. I have references in the body text to 3 websites.

I deliberately didn’t include http:// with 2 of them, so for most sites they will not be made into live links. They are not self serving links, and 2 of them are very high quality sites in Polish that any reviewer will appreciate is linking to quality content. The 3rd link that I made live was specifically to the English content. I did think of only mentioning the English link, but the page does not do justice to the depth of authority of the person I was giving a testimonial for.

Hopefully they will be allowed. I should also note that the link in the articles unfortunately doesn’t have anchor text. I will manually log into the key websites that allow me to use anchor text as soon as the article has been posted.