Should you use a content site like MySmartBlog?
Hell no.
Here’s why.
“In some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”
You know who said that?
You know what they might do about it?
“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”
It is the cardinal rule of content marketing: ONLY USE ORIGINAL CONTENT THAT DOESN’T APPEAR ELSEWHERE.
Google Chooses Which of the Multiple Identical Articles to Show on the SERPs
Google’s algorithm isn’t stupid. In fact, it’s smarter than a lot of people are. It’s only going to rank one — or maybe two — of the multiple copies of the same, exact content that dozens of websites have.
What is MySmartBlog Doing? (And Why Isn’t it Actually Smart?)
MySmartBlog gives the same content to multiple people in the same industry… and they actually charge people for it.
They’re selling people the same article, and those people think they’re doing themselves a favor by posting it on their websites.
Here’s an example of an article pushed out by MySmartBlog. See, dozens of people have it on their websites, verbatim:
Unfortunately, like I said, there’s no way Google is going to rank all those pages. When you type in an exact-match for a partial title, only two of the sites are ranked:
What Can Happen if You Use MySmartBlog?
Each person who buys this content is flirting with a Google penalty. Even if Google never hits them with a manual penalty, nobody’s ever going to see those posts through the search engines (and that’s one of the points of setting up a blog: to capture traffic from the search engines).
Here’s Google’s own Matt Cutts on article marketing and snagging content that everyone else is snagging, too:
Even in 2011, Moz called out article marketing (the same stuff that MySmartBlog is doing):
Should You Use MySmartBlog?
Here’s the deal.
Even if your own blog posts suck, you’re better off doing it yourself than you are using MySmartBlog.
Seriously.
Even if they’re terrible.
Original content (even with grammatical errors and a few typos here and there) beats the crap out of putting up one copy of one post that other people already have.
Don’t waste your money. Their base package is something like $100 per month… if you take 15 minutes and put together a terrible, awful, horrible, no-good, rotten blog post, you’ll be doing better than the people who are scammed into buying content from MySmartBlog.
