Site Reference Forums

the nofollow idea is valid,
what of the time a person writes exclusive, but in two weeks puts on their own site?

How much of a page needs to be unique?
or put another way
How much of a page is used to determine it's a duplicate?

i mean, if you took 2 articles, substr() them in half and post them together on the same page, would that page be duplicate content?

do it with 4, or 5 or XX

surely the more articles on a page the lower the posibilities of the page becoming duplicate. You could possibly get away with not even cutting them up, just slapping them together.

use whatever system you want to match articles together. Rand() would infinitely decrease the possibility of dupes as the page content changes on each damn refresh!

At the end of the day, building a page for Visitors is not at the forefront of anyones mind is it?

I am curious as to what we can offer or do in order to encourage people to submit unique content?

So, which came first,

*  the chicken or the egg?

*  the value of the backlink or the unique content with the backlink in the bio box?

Article writing and submission is based on getting value for effort in the backlink.

Some fine people, such as the Gypsy, may contribute unique articles out of the goodness of their heart, but most will be looking for something of value in return.

Several people regularly contribute unique content in the forum. The return:

If they have a SEO related buisness website, then the first couple of links may have some value. If they run and SEO a website in any other field, then the backlinks are pretty much useless, apart from assisting in indexing of new sites.

Therefore:

*  Allow unique, dofollow, manually placed deep links at the end of the posts of approved SR contributers.

*  Allow a bit of off toppic content in these posts so as to give the backlinks some relevency in the case of non SEO site backlinks.

If the above two suggestions are not acceptable, then come up with a better idea to attract better forum content. This idea builds on what we already have.

This will increase the quantity and quantity of forum posts, thus, over time, increasing the value of backlinks in the articles section. In turn, the increased value of backlinks in article bio boxes will attract unique articles of better quality, thus improving SR ranking.

The value of an SR backlink will place SR in a position to demand first publishing rites of articles.

Beyond first publishing rites, no exclusive requirements can successfully be made. Scraper sites, ya know, and content thieves.

Please note that it would be impossible to police article ownership once word got around that SR was publishing unique, high quality SEO articles. All that can be done is to get the content indexed first.

Regards,
Laurie.

While we hae a few ideas to encourage unqiue stuff... ultimately I hope to make SR a regular stop for the Marketing crowd and the traffic should hopefully placate many.

Unfortunately many peeps use SR for link building via article marketing more than actual exposure or traffic. This is why they pump them out to many sites... I'd prefer it to be more like WebPro news and related sites as far as peeps comming back to get their daily fix...

I know it can certainly drive traffic as SR is one of my top referrers lately with some of the blog posts I have done... 

Will we ever get there? Will it be destined to be a repository? Maybe, but I was merely thinking out loud about ways to increase the reputation of the place over-all... we have some ideas cooking... see where it leads.

Part of the problem is from an SEO standpoint... having a large amount of duplicate content severly limits the ability to drive organic traffic... Heck, I wouldn't even care as much if peeps gave a 2 week grace period before posting them elsewhere... as it stands, many of them are already indexed elsewhere prior to be picked up on SR....

... time will tell......

TheGypsy wrote:

While we hae a few ideas to encourage unqiue stuff... ultimately I hope to make SR a regular stop for the Marketing crowd and the traffic should hopefully placate many.

Unfortunately many peeps use SR for link building via article marketing more than actual exposure or traffic. This is why they pump them out to many sites... I'd prefer it to be more like WebPro news and related sites as far as peeps comming back to get their daily fix...

I know it can certainly drive traffic as SR is one of my top referrers lately with some of the blog posts I have done... 

Will we ever get there? Will it be destined to be a repository? Maybe, but I was merely thinking out loud about ways to increase the reputation of the place over-all... we have some ideas cooking... see where it leads.

Part of the problem is from an SEO standpoint... having a large amount of duplicate content severly limits the ability to drive organic traffic... Heck, I wouldn't even care as much if peeps gave a 2 week grace period before posting them elsewhere... as it stands, many of them are already indexed elsewhere prior to be picked up on SR....

... time will tell......

I still like to believe SR has some credibility in the marketplace. That is why I still put a few articles into your site... Not that many mind you, but I do send you a few.

And when I am looking for my articles later, SR tends to keep good rankings on the articles they accept. The best thing about SR right now is the increasing number of people using the RSS feeds from SR.

If you put nofollows on my links, I would still post here regardless. I use article marketing primarily to put my message in front of potential audiences, and to therefore generate traffic from my articles. SEM is a bonus for article marketing, but it is not the primary goal with my own article marketing.

(I don't put customer articles here anymore, because your anti-spam tools have made submission here that much more time-consuming.)

If you forced me to only submit unique articles, you would only see me once and again for a forum comment like now. I have not done much in your forum in a very long time.

The forum is your best opportunity to generate new and unique content. If your forum was more active, you would not need to worry too much about unique content.

My absence from this forum has been long-running, since I noticed a real lack of activity on this forum. Looking today, I see far more "recent" activity than I have noticed in most of the last couple years. All you have to do is to keep an eye to the "last post dates" in the forums, to get an indication of what I am looking at here.

I submit here, not because my articles on this site provide much bang. I only see a dozen visitors a month from SR. The reason I post here is because I have always felt that SR has potential that it is not realizing. I post here in the hope that one day, SR will realize its full potential.

If I have to do unique articles to see my articles on your site, then I will have to look more closely at what I receive in return from SR. And when one can only see a dozen or so visitors per month, unique article requirements would force me to stop posting any articles here at all.

As to more frequent posting in your forum, this site has a lot of very tight cliques in which I do not fit. I suspect that is the same reason why activity on this forum is hit and miss to say the least. People sense where they are not really welcome and they stop coming.

The uniqueness of the articles on your main site are not a primary issue I don't think. Look at SiteProNews. They don't print unique articles either. And yet they continue to have a half a million loyal readers. What is so much different between them and you?

* You have a forum and they don't. (The forum is your greatest asset, and yet it is not a really friendly place to meet like-minded people.)

* Their site is prettier than yours.

* Their site is easier to navigate than yours.

* Their site has more links to more useful resources than you do.

WebPro news is much the same. It shines for a number of reasons. In their case, they pay people to create original content. They haven't accepted reprint content for a few years, but they "pay" to have content developed for them. The flow of cash more than makes up for not using reprint content. But not everyone can afford to pay to create loads of original content. (Granted, not everyone on the WPN site is on the payroll, but enough information on their site is paid-to-develop-content, specifically the video feeds, to make a real difference for them.)

All-in-all, you have a website that has true potential that is vastly underutilized. The lack of unique content at your front door is not your problem. If other people can generate vast traffic utilizing non-unique content, then you should be able to do the same. If you are not, the problem lies elsewhere.

While I may not be influenced by nofollow tags, some of the other article writers may just bid you farewell if you do that. By making it harder to get content in your site, you will be ensuring that you will have much less content to choose from. With less content on your site, you will find traffic dropping off worse than it has.

I say that with all hopes that you will take it as sincere advice. There was a time, many years ago, when I could count on SR to send lots of traffic to my site, when one of my articles was published. There was a time when SR was one of my "five most coveted targets" for my articles. These days, if you do or you don't publish my articles, then it is not going to be a great loss to me.

If I find out that my articles are no longer wanted here, then I could save an extra five minutes of my time by not submitting here at all.

I am real easy. If you don't want me to submit articles to your site, I will stop immediately, and you will never see nor hear from me again. (Given my past experiences here, I would not be the least bit surprised for someone to pop their head up and tell me to not let the door hit me on the ass on the way out. But if you ask me, that is the reason why this site has lost its place in the limelight over the last couple years.)

Bill Platt