Recently I wrote an article discussing the merits of using free reprint articles on your website to increase your search engine ranking.
A few days after publishing, I received a ‘please help’ email from Loren, a small business owner. Her website is all about glass art, and she wanted some clarification on some of the points I made in my previous article. Loren’s questions were good ones, and the answers important, so I thought I’d publish them.
Q: We have a site for glass art. From your article, I gather that if I create an articles page with free reprint articles (written by other people) containing ‘glass art’ type keywords, I’ll get higher search rankings for those keywords? Is that correct? If so, what page comes up in the rankings? The article itself or my Home page? Also, if the article is being used by other webmasters, won’t the search results also include their version of the article?
A: In answer to your first question, yes, having an articles page with keyword rich free reprint articles generally has the effect of increasing your ranking. Google thinks highly of sites with a lot of helpful...