You're right, well, maybe.

One thing that I am sure you realized when reading about SEO and Google's algorithm is that there is a lot of conflicting info out there. But mainly, much of the info is pure speculation. Some of it better than others since it is based on better observations and such.

The duplicate content thing is true. Google will penalize you if you have content found on other sites. However, I personally believe that it depends on the website in question as far as how badly Google will penalize you, if at all. But then, this is from my own observation and I cannot say that is is scientifically sound observation however I believe it is logical. I mean, if there are 5 popular news sources and they all get some articles from the AP and place them on their sites, then will any of them get penalized by Google. Probably not, especially if you are that popular and you have good Google PR and great off-site and on-site SEO and Google bot tends to think that you are an "important site".

But anyway, it sounds to me that the only way to get around this is to not have others write the articles for your site. Like you said, the chance will be great that someone will post an article they posted elsewhere. In fact, I think the chances of them writing an article for you and JUST for you is slim. If it IS a new article they wrote, at some point they will have it published elsewhere especially if they know doing so would benefit them or their own site. Usually, when you want others to write articles for your site and have them agree that they will never post that article on any other site, they will want paid for that.

So I think your absolute best bet is to write your own articles so that you are sure that the articles will not be published on any other site (unless someone steals them and posted them on their own site - in which case you will get their hosting account shutdown by contacting their host about their customer stealing your copyrighted content).

Love, Hugs, and Kisses,
Bob Baroner

> I haven't spent a lot of time worrying about search engines over the past
> eight years because FIB has always done well (by virtue of the message
> board).

> Lately, though, I've been thinking and reading a lot about SEs, and one
> thing keeps coming up:  the need for ORIGINAL content and the
> possibility of being blackballed if your content is the same as that found
> in a bzillion other places on the net.

> Makes sense to me, which brings me to my question:

> Thanks to Margaret MacGillivray (who has been *incredibly* generous with
> her time and her "finds"), I'm thinking about adding an
> "article bank" to FIB, where all you dears can post your
> articles if you'd like (and I can pick and choose if I don't like, so
> people like Kimberly & James & Sam needn't get any bright ideas).

> Then suddenly it hit me!!

> If I grow a reasonably successful "article bank" here, two
> things will happen: People will be posting the same articles they've
> posted in several, or dozens, or hundreds of other article banks. People
> looking for free content will come here and pluck those articles to post
> on their web sites. The obvious result will be that eventually a large
> part of FIB's content could be anything *but* original -- in that the
> exact same articles will be all over the place.

> Is my thinking flawed here?

> Couldn't that do serious damage to FIB's success in the search engines
> over time?

> Luv,