I know. I know. There are SEO folks out there curling their toes at that statement, so before y’all start venting … read on.

You have a blog. What is MORE important to you … Google rank? or real readers? No. Really.

Ok. Now that I’ve rankled y’all … The duplicate content deficit was primarily designed to guard against a company (or person) replicating the exact same site under a large number of domain names. And, I am not talking about having your blog composed of largely copied/duplicate articles.

Shared content works by keeping new, relevant content on your blog hence keeping your readers returning and reducing attrition, as well as providing the link opportunity.

There ARE in fact, very successful (if overgrown feed) aggregators whose blogs are strictly duplicate content. These sites make money, have huge traffic numbers and are very useful to readers … AND they have relatively strong page rank.

Expanding your brand is also very important and we, as business people, are urged to write articles for publication to expand links to our site. See http://tinyurl.com/kjrfc8 for more information. Again, you could view this as a duplicate content issue or a traffic generation and link creation tactic.

The goal, particularly in blogs, is to create a large amount of traffic, increase your Alexa ranking, so you can sell advertising and make money.

In my experience, the content first indexed often retains the higher page rank. To ensure this, when I post articles on free article sites, I do it about a month after I first posted it on my site. If I want to “win the duplicate content war” as you put it, I will “wrap” keyword infused content “around” the duplicate content – like add a preface to the content and a summary at the end.

All in all, some great questions Jocelyn. Much appreciated!

My concern is as follows. If your website is of higher PR and a newbee is working really hard on writing content; whose blog is going to win the duplicate content war? Who will appear on Google first?

Now I do agree giving the backlink is very helpful. Also, I realize that your readers may discover him through the post. However, the content he wrote has brought readers to your site not his initially.

Just food for thought.

What has your experience been when you have tried this approach?