March 28th, 2008 by Diane Sievert
Free SEO article content could hurt your website's organic search engine rankings - a high price to pay
Sure, relevant, optimized content can do wonders for your website - but can you get this Web Content for free? While there are plenty of online distribution centers that offer reprintable SEO articles free of charge, using these articles isn't always the best way to add search engine optimized content to your website. In fact, they have the potential to do more harm than good.
The first issue has to do with the way major search engines react to duplicate content. Since free SEO articles are available to any and all interested parties, they most likely appear on multiple domains. The search engine spiders are designed to filter out this kind of duplicate content, as it's in the engine's best interest to present the user with varied listings rather than repetitive results. It's therefore quite probable your webpage won't appear in the search results - Google and the other major search engines, like Google, make this very clear in their webmaster guidelines.
The second and most pressing concern has to do with the overall quality and relevance of the article in question. An article written expressly for reprinting will most often be intentionally vague - it's written this way in order to increase the number of potential users. In addition, the author is most likely a novice writer - knowledgeable SEO writers will not give away their content for pauper's pay - and in most cases, the end result is an article that suffers from stilted style, obvious keyword stuffing and useless or common sense information.
This kind of content will do little to convert visitors into paying customers, and it could actually hurt your website's organic search engine rankings if the engines classify it as spam. That's a high price to pay for an article that does little to improve your rank.
So, can you get SEO articles for free? Absolutely. Can you find well-written, free SEO articles that will effectively drive website traffic? Happy hunting - it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
Your safest bet is hiring an experienced SEO writer or Internet marketing company specializing in Web content to create unique, optimized content specific to the products and services you offer on your website. This is a more reliable and productive way of improving the flow of Web traffic to your site since you won't run the risk of alienating potential customers and the search engines with poorly written or irrelevant articles.
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Author, Diane Sievert, Content Development Manager for InfoSearch Media, Inc., specializes in helping businesses increase Web traffic through quality search-targeted online text and Web video. Find out how informative Web content can increase website traffic to your site with a free competitive site analysis that makes recommendations on how to dominate your particular online market segment. Or, for more information, visit http://www.infosearchmedia.com.
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