How should I handle author attribution for ghostwritten content?
-
I've been using Crowdcontent for article production, and always feel like I'm potentially missing out on some authority or social proof with visitors (and maybe Google?) by not attributing an author (Crowdcontent doesn't give you the name of the author, otherwise I would just use their name). Would I be doing myself any favors by attributing myself as the author and pointing it back to my Google+ profile? Thanks in advance for any guidance!
-
Yes, I believe google would give you a boost if you could acquire an influential writer in your field. Author rank is still new territory, so the only way to be certain is to test.
-
Thank you Thomas. Would there be a benefit in hiring writers with topical expertise or credentials directly, and asking to link their Google+ profiles in the author byline on articles they produce for my sites? In other words, would Google look more favorably on my site if it had content written by highly-referenced influencers In a particular field?
Thanks!
-
I've been pretty impressed with the service, and so far it's been worth the price in terms of ROI. I only publish high-quality content on my sites because obviously I also want to give visitors a reason to subscribe and link in, in addition to getting love from google.
With regards to paying freelance writers, look at it this way: NY Times pays a lot of writers across their sites to produce content--writers who are no more invested in NYTimes than the salary or payment they receive for their work. I could never put out enough content on my own to stay competitive. It's simply a division of labor.
I agree with your point about the risk in losing a clear and consistent author voice when using multiple writers. For that reason alone I might avoid it, coupled with Thomas' point about volume of content being low-value when it comes to author rank.
-
lol... "wait 'googs stolz my cheezburger??"
-
Well put Thomas. I very much agree with your ideas here, especially the part on Google's perception of this practice. He seems very certain that Google won't ever penalize this. We all know that Google is entirely unpredictable. Wait til they roll out their cat-penalties and start targeting the 'i can haz cheezburger' sites.
-
The answer to your question is no, imo. I don't think people care about the author unless it's a well-established source. Now perhaps you would like to make yourself a well-established source, but I feel like that would be hard to do with somebody else writing all of your articles... you'd never establish a clear voice.
As far as what you said... that's good. I guess. Better than the $5 per article sites. I still don't much care for the service, but to each their own. As I said, I can't see how somebody else who was not invested in my company could come up with better content than someone invested in said business. Again, just my opinion.
Yes, if the articles are spammy looking Google could possibly penalize you depending on submissions. Sounds like at that price they won't/shouldn't be.
How much traffic and visibility are you getting on all of these articles? Just curious about this model...
-
You pay a "ghost writer" to be invisible. Therefore you claim the content as your own. If the content is original quality content than it could and most like would boost your authority. But author rank is more than just having a lot of content published by you, it is about influence. So simply writing a lot of good content does not make you an influencer. Your influence and in turn author rank are based on the citations you receive and the traffic you command.
Back to your 'ghost writer" question. Ghost writers have been used on and offline for sometime now. It seems to be a generally acceptable practice. But this does not mean that Google does or will always accept this. So if you were to ask me if this were acceptable, then I would judge this by how much you are contributing to the content.
An alternative method would be to set up a "persona" as the writer. This is justified by saying authors use pen names. Indeed, Franklin once wrote newspaper columns under a pen name in his early years for fear his age would discredit his work. But this "persona" approach may also run a risk with google.
So pick one or the other, and stick with your story.
-
Hi Jesse, thanks.
To clarify, CrowdContent is not an article submission site. It's a platform like Contently where you're essentially just hiring freelance writers. Their writers are all professionals from the US or Canada, and I generally pay between $50-$100 per 500-750 word article. Quality of content isn't the issue. It's simply not feasible for me to write all my content across dozens of sites in-house; that wouldn't scale, and I don't see a problem hiring freelancers for that. Google isn't going to know or care whether I wrote the content or paid someone to.
My question is whether I am missing out on any favorability with visitors or the SEs by not adding an author line to these articles.
-
Yikes.
Okay don't take this the wrong way, but I don't know why you're using an article provision service and I would flat-out advise against it entirely. These article submission sites are a perfect way to grab an unnatural link penalty. Granted, I don't have any experience with this particular company, but I'm willing to be the articles sound spammy and aren't going to help you at all.
I guess what I'm saying is, write your own content in-house. That's the only way to have complete control and avoid unnecessary penalties. Not to mention you will care more about it and spend more time writing content that people will actually want to read.
---my two cents.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Dynamically populated content
We are developing a website for a school that has 19 campuses divided into 8 districts. Ideally, we would like to have one search page that dynamically populates when people search WHILE on the site. The question is what happens when someone does an organic search, will the search engine populate with the schools in that district. For instance, if i search on Google "Austin Schools", will the Austin district-that does not have a unique URL- show up in a Google search? What the generated page looks like is on this link http://imgur.com/stCQcP6. If yes, any special type of coding we need to add to the backend?
On-Page Optimization | | jgodwin0 -
Blog on server or embedded? Duplicate content?
Wondering what would be best in terms of SEO. Should I install some blog software actually on the website or can I just embed say a blogger.com blog? if I did that would they consider it duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Superflys0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hey Moz Community, Newbie here. On my second week of Moz and I love it but have a couple questions regarding crawl errors. I have two questions: 1. I have a few pages with duplicate content but it say 0 duplicate URL's. How do I know what is duplicated in this instance? 2. I'm not sure if anyone here is familiar with an IDX for a real estate website. But I have this setup on my site and it seems as though all the links it generates for different homes for sale show up as duplicate pages. For instance, http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258 is listed as having duplicate page content compared with 7 duplicate URLS: http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78247
On-Page Optimization | | HandyRealtySA
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78253
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78245
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78261
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260 I've attached a screenshot that shows 2 of the pages that state duplicate page content but have 0 duplicate URLs. Also you can see somewhat about the idx duplicate pages. rel="canonical" is functioning on these pages, or so it seems when I view the source code from the page. Any help is greatly appreciated. skitch.png0 -
Posting content from our books to our website
Hello, I am the newly appointed in-house seo person for a small business. The founders of our company have written several books, which we sell. But book sales are a small part of our business. We are considering posting to our website some or all of the content of the books. This content is directly relevant to the existing content of our website and would be available for free to all visitors. 1. Is it likely that the traffic and links to the new book pages would improve the search engine rankings of our existing pages? 2. We already have pdf versions of each book we could post, which are formatted nicely. Should we convert these to html to make them more friendly to search engines? 3. Of course, we would have to split each book into multiple web pages, perhaps one chapter per page. How much content could each new page optimally accommodate? 4. Would it be more valuable from an SEO perspective to post pieces of the books over time in a blog format? Thank you very much for your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Thin content and tabs on page
I am reviewing a site, and the web designer used tabs to impart information. I think the tabs idea looks great, but it leaves the page looking thin. Here is a link to a product page, could anyone chime in please? http://www.aireindustrial.net/spill-berms/foam-berm-drive-over-berms.asp Thanks in advance for your opinion!
On-Page Optimization | | drufast10 -
Duplicate content issue in SEOmoz campaign.
Hi, We are running a campaign for a website in SEOmoz. We get a dup content issue warning: http://www.oursite.com and http://www.oursite.com/ are being seen as 2 different urls. Only difference among 2 urls is the trailing slash at the end of the second url. Why is this happening? I was aware of www vs non www but never heard of an issue related to the slash. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH1 -
Do product pages need unique content or does having duplcate content hurt on those pages?
We are adding product rapidly to our website but this requires allowing duplicate to exist on our product pages of furniture-online.com. From an SEO standpoint do we need to make this content unique for each product. Since we aren't link building to specific product pages and we don't anticipate product pages being found in a search result, are we ok leaving the duplicate content in place and spending our dollars elsewhere?
On-Page Optimization | | gallreddy0