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 page content
These two URLs are being flagged as 98% similar in the code. We're a large ecommerce site, and while it would be ideal to have unique product descriptions on each page we currently don't have the bandwith. Thoughts on what else might be triggering this duplicate content? https://www.etundra.com/restaurant-parts/cooking-equipment-parts/fryers/scoops-skimmers/fmp-175-1081-fryer-crumb-scoop/ https://www.etundra.com/restaurant-equipment/concession-equipment/condiment-pumps/tablecraft-664-wide-mouth-condiment-pump/ Thanks, Natalie
On-Page Optimization | | eTundra0 -
Suggestions on dealing with duplicate content?
What are the best ways to protect / deal with duplicate content? I've added an example scenario, Nike Trainer model 1 – has an overview page that also links to a sub-page about cushioning, one about Gore-Tex and one about breathability. Nike Trainer model 2,3,4,5 – have an overview page that also links to sub-pages page about cushioning , Gore-Tex and breathability. In each of the sub-pages the URL is a child of the parent so a distinct page from each other e.g. /nike-trainer/model-1/gore-tex /nike-trainer/model-2/gore-tex. There is some differences in material composition, some different images and of course the product name is referred multiple times. This makes the page in the region of 80% unique. Any suggestions welcome about the above example or any other ways you guys know of dealing with duplicate content.
On-Page Optimization | | punchseo0 -
Does the link title attribute benefit seo?
Hello, Anyone could tell me the benefit SEO of link title attribute. Is **Link Title **ranking factor? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
Ecommerce: content on category pages
I have to optimize some online Shops and after Panda I really don't know what to think about thin content on product overview pages anymore... used to be that we could improve our rankings easily just by adding 1-2 sentences on such a page. This always worked for non-overly competitive terms. Now It feels like it doesn't work any longer, but I couldn't put my finger on it and I don't have the resources to test. Here's an example of what I mean: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/wandtattoos/aus_aller_welt.html
On-Page Optimization | | zeepartner
I would add max. 3 lines of text directly over the product thumbnails. What do you think? Is it worth adding some text on a product overview page or do I not even have to bother post-Panda?0 -
How best to approach archiving badly optimised content
I signed up SEO Moz about a month ago as i'm currently rebuilding my site from scratch and wanted to learn from current mistakes. At present I use the forum software Invision Power Board to manage my site and one thing i've learnt is that it is terrible for SEO, there are so many thousands of errors listed by the crawler that it's not even worth trying to fix it. However because it has 5 or 6 years worth of content alot of which is on Google I don't want to totally remove it, rather I would prefer to archive it of with a big banner at the top letting anybody that visits it know that it's no longer in use and pointing them to the frontpage. I should note that it is in a subfolder already so the location of any of the links won't be changed. So the few questions I have are: The forum index has alot of link juice and I would like to redirect that to the new forum index, however for archive purposes the old index still needs to be accessible. Some topics are very popular and appear high in Google and have alot of backlinks. The important information in these forum topics will be available elsewhere on the new rebuilt site. Again I would like to redirect both link juice and users to the new page, however being a forum topic there are tens or hundreds of pages of old comments that need to still be accessible for reference. There are bound to be duplicate meta title and description issues with new similarly named categories appearing both on the new site and the old forum, is this going to be that much of a problem? So really what i'm asking is, how should I go about archiving this of without destroying content and rankings, but still making sure that the new stuff is getting the right exposure both to users and search engines alike?
On-Page Optimization | | freezedriedmedia0 -
Split testing and dupe content
Hi Everyone, good to be here. I'd like to do split testing in Adwords, currently with a clients site we are selling from a normal site with navigation. The site has about 5 specific products, I want to dupe one of the products and create a funnel without navigation distractions right to checkout. Then A/B test the same product pages in Adwords, one with nav and one without. Will the dupe content be ignored do you think? I'm only slightly concerned as the product pages rank well at the moment.
On-Page Optimization | | eonicWeb0 -
Duplicate page content errors
Site just crawled and report shows many duplicate pages but doesn't tell me which ones are dups of each other. For you experienced duplicate page experts, do you have a subscription with copyscape and pay $.05 per test? What is the best way to clear these? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | joemas990