feedburner

Enter your email address:

Zimbio - Is it Good or Bad For Your Blog or Website?

Labels:

Is Zimbio good or bad for your website? Are you worried about Zimbio effecting your website's page rank or search engine results? If you know anything about SEO you could be a little worried about all the duplicate content that is being created by the aforementioned website. I have put the website to the test and this article is a direct result of my actual findings.

To put is short Zimbio is good and bad for your website at the same time! Let me tell you why it is good and why it can be bad. I ask that you read everything in this article before you formulate your own opinions about the website of discussion. If you use Zimbio then you may already be having these questions, and if you do not use it then you will end up asking theses same scenarios eventually.

Zimbio is bad for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if you have your blog being fed via RSS. I know that you may want to take the easy way out and just have your feed pulled from your blog or website. I did it myself, and found out the hard way that Google just doesn't like that very much. They ripped all of my webpages from their search results without thinking twice about it. I particularly worry about the search engine Google because everybody else just follows their lead. If you rank pretty high up on that search engine then you will rank pretty well with their competitors.

Why is Zimbio bad for SEO when I automatically feed my blog to it? That part is simple, but complicated at the same time. Zimbio is a pretty massive website that updates daily, and with all the other publishers submitting articles it updates almost every minute. Since that article directory is pumping out relative content that is rich in quality Google indexes it rather quickly. In short, Zimbio is bigger then your website and will get their content indexed first even if it is your content to begin with. Do you see where this is leading, and how it can potentially harm your website or blog for the search engines?

Why is that a big deal? I want my articles to get indexed by Google and to show up in the search results as soon as possible. Alright, here is why that situation is no good for your blog or site. If you know anything about SEO then you know that Google simply hates duplicate content. As a matter of fact, the search company will pick one of the duplicates and display it in the search results, exclusively. If you publish your content first and then Zimbio grabs it via your feed and gets indexed before your website does then they will get your content. That is right, even if you are the originator of the content Google will still show the first one that is indexed especially if you are a small to medium website or blog.

Why cant Google and the other search engines just look at the time stamp of my article and see that I am the originator of the content? They can, but it will take them a few months to sort through all the duplicate content and could take even longer. As of right now there are over 300 billion websites on the internet that are constantly submitting content everywhere. The googlebot has a lot of webpages to crawl so it could take them some time to find an error and then even longer to sort it out. Right now, their moto is to just display the first one indexed and not show the rest until proved otherwise.

So I know to not automatically feed my blog or site to the article directory, but is that the only reason that Zimbio is no good for SEO? So far, that is the only reason that I could find as to why you should not use the article directory for pinging your blog or website. So in other words if you submit your rewritten articles manually you will be able to use this directory for article marketing. Zimbio is a younger website that has a growing database of readers and publishers. Let's not forget to mention that the website is not as well known as some of it's competitors so it has a ton of untapped marketing potential.

What if I rewrite my articles and submit then manually? That will work so long as the content is different then the original source. Another thing that you can do is just submit a portion of the original content with a link back to the original website or blog that has the complete full article or blog post. Just like any other article directory, Zimbio, will work to your advantage and pull in some extra traffic. Do not forget that you can also build backlinks rather quickly by putting a direct link to your website or blog's URL right  in the content, and you should also put one in your author bio.

In short, DO NOT feed your RSS or "ping your blog" through Zimbio because they will get credit for your content if it gets indexed first on Google. You can rewrite or submit portions of your articles manually and still be able to use the article directory.

I hope that I have cleared some things up all the people that are currently reading this. If I have helped you please leave me a comment and subscribe to my website. If you need to leave me some additional feedback non related to this article then simply use the feedback button on the left side of the screen.


If I have helped you why not buy me a cup of coffee?


1 comments:
gravatar
Jay said...
February 2, 2010 at 1:14 AM  

Hey good thoughts, I was worried about the duplicate content. I let it ride on the rss feed for a while since I have a read more tag, so it doesn't get my full article. If I've gotten a single hit from Zimbio, I would be surprised.

Zimbio also jacks your images and content without delivering any traffic. I couldn't see the no-follow tag on their link highlight with my add-on for Firefox, but it's clearly not a clean link.

Post a Comment

Please Familiarize Yourself With Our Policies Below: