I like to use Creative Commons, Not Article Directories, for Quality Written Content

I publish many articles on my websites, articles which have appeared on other websites that I do not own. Yet I hear much advice, saying that one should not do this, that by publishing articles and information that appeared elsewhere will result in Google giving me a "duplicate content penalty".

I would agree that it's best to publish original content. But sometimes I don't. And I haven't noticed any overall adverse effect from doing so.

I'm not going to argue that duplicate content can never have a downside. I just want to make it clear that duplicate content is not always bad.

For the last month or so I've been publishing content on my blogs that would be considered duplicate content, because I didn't write it and because it has appeared previously on web pages other than my own.

I do practice discrimination, and I am a bit picky, when it comes to publishing content from other sites. The last thing I want to do is to litter my site with some poorly written, keyword stuffed articles from one of those "articles directory" sites.

What I've been doing over the past month or so is republished many good articles distributed under a Creative Commons license.

The articles I've found that come from article directories in my opinion are of very poor quality. I rarely find one that is very informative.

The writers of such articles don't seem all that concerned about providing a reader with relevant information rather than just relevant keywords sprinkled over the content. The sole purpose of such articles seems to be to get people to click the link to the author's website that appears at the bottom of each article.

Even if republishing e-zine articles on your site drove some traffic your way, would you really want to litter your site with such inane and insincere content?

Now I do have some articles that I republished from article directories that do drive a good amount of traffic, and they do result in conversions on my site. But I chose them carefully.

A source of content that is too often overlooked by webmasters and online marketers is the Creative Commons. Creative Commons licensing is a type of copyright which has many forms. One of the many forms of Creative Commons licensing allows others to reprint works created under this license.

That means, if you were searching the web and you found a great article - the type of article that you would bookmark or Digg - you could republish that article on your own web site. That is, provided that the article is published under a creative Commons license that allows you to do that. Not all creative Commons licenses allow you to have republishing rights.

What I like to do is perform a creative Commons search using Google for. I'm a look at the search results for my topic choice, and if I like the article and it is indeed under a license that lets me republish it, I'll post it to a blog.

And if I don't find anything on those sites that I wish to republish, I'll check to see if the site has a feed, and then I'll dump those feeds into a feed reader so that I could be updated when those content creators produce some newcontent.

What I've noticed after a month of republishing people's creative Commons articles is that I can usually outrank the original author by doing some simple SEO stuff.

Most notably, what I do is change the title tag of the article. You know, with most blogging software, by default, the title tag is created from the actual title of the article? Well, instead of letting my CMS just take the title tag from the title of the article. I specify my own title tag. That way I can provide a better title tag than the original author did when he first published his content.

Okay, I'm done rambling here, in fact, I'm just testing out Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. It's part of my plan to not write any articles at all.

Anyhow, the next time you head on over to an article directory, think about how crappy the content is on those sites. Do you really want somebody else's crappy marketing driven articles on your site? Learn more about creative Commons licensing and go do a search for some well-written articles by passionate authors. You'd be amazed at all of the quality writing that is released under a license that let's you republish.