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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Duplicate Content and Other Issues from Blog Tags and Categories
I have recently taken over the maintenance/redesign of our website and after setting up Moz I see many errors:
On-Page Optimization | | jgoethert
Duplicate content
Missing descriptions
Duplicate titles
etc. All are related to blog categories and tags. My questions are: are these errors hurting us? Should I simply remove tags/categories from the sitemaps or bite the bullet and create content for every single category page? Our site is https://financiallysimple.com/ and we are using Yoast plugin in Wordpress (if that helps)2 -
Duplicate Content in Footers (Not as routine as it seems)
Hello there, I know that content in the footer of sites are safe from duplication penalisation; however, what if the footers where replicated across different subdomains? For instance, the footer was duplicated across: www.example.com blog.example.com blog2.example.com I don't see it as a big issue personally; however, outsourced "specialists" seem to think that this is causing duplication problems and therefore negatively affecting the ranking power of "lesser" subdomains i.e. not the www version, which is by far the strongest subdomain. Would be good to get some insight if anybody has any. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | SEONOW1230 -
Content Mismatch
Hi, I've added my app to search console, and there are reported 480 content mismatch pages. How can I solve this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Duplicate content question
Hi I have a site that is run off one CMS system but has 3 different web addresses. One is a comic shop, one is a toy shop and one is a game shop. Now due to the nature of what we are selling some of the products we are selling on both or all 3 of the sites. I was wondering as to whether this would affect my ability to rank in google and if i would be penalised for any duplicate content? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | TheZenAgency0 -
How do you handle different business locations for search?
Would like to get peoples suggestion on how you handle different business locations in different cities. We have tried multiple tactics for different clients. Some have worked better than others. Example: We have a window company that does great in Austin. Now they want to move into Dallas. In the past, we have created "landing pages" optimized for that locality. However, with Googles new updates I dont think this will work anymore. With others, we have added a "tab" and have similar pages of the entire site optimized for that location. This seems to have been working better. What are your suggestion of how you handle different locations from city to city. Any input is appreciated! Thanks! Charles
On-Page Optimization | | seomozinator0 -
What is the best way to resolve duplicate content issue
Hi I have a client whose site content has been scraped and used in numerous other sites. This is detrimental to ranking. One term we wish to rank for is nowhere. My question is this: what's the quickest way to resolve a duplicate content issue when other sites have stolen your content? I understand that maybe I should firstly contact these site owners and 'appeal to their better nature'. This will take time and they may not even comply. I've also considered rewriting our content. Again this takes time. Has anybody experienced this issue before? If so how did you come to a solution? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | sicseo0 -
Exponentially Increasing Duplicate Content On Blogs
Most of the clients that I pick up are either new to SEO best practices, or have worked with sketchy SEO providers in the past, who did little more than build spammy links. Most of them have deployed little if any on-site SEO best practices, and early on I spend a lot of time fixing canonical and duplicate content issues alla 301 redirects. Using SEOMOZ, however, I see a lot of duplicate content issues with blogs that live on the sites I work on. With every new blog article we publish, more duplicate content builds up. I feel like duplicate content on blogs grows exponentially, because every time you write a blog article, it exists provisionally on the blog homepage, the article link, a category page, maybe a tag page, and an author page. I have a two-part question: Is duplicate content like this a problem for a blog -- and for the website that the blog lives on? Are search engines able to parse out that this isn't really duplicate content? If it is a problem, how would you go about solving it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
How much constitutes duplicate content in your opinion?
Mornin' In your experience, how much constitutes duplicate content? A sentence, a paragraph, half a page, etc? What about quotes - are they considered duplications, too, if there aren't quotation marks? Over the years, the client has been a bit bad in taking a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, and coupling it all together as daily news on their site. I'm now in the middle of a purge. Oh boy! All hail originality.
On-Page Optimization | | Martin_S0