There are a lot of tempting deals out there, and using free articles is one of them. If your business doesn’t have the budget to build out your website content, but you know you need pages (you do!), it might seem like a good idea to populate your site with freebies.

Let me put it bluntly: you’d be better off putting nothing at all on your website.

You’d be better off writing it yourself (even if you’re a terrible writer).

Here’s why.

Free Articles for Your Website Have Hidden Costs

Things that are published on the Internet are time- and date-stamped. Google’s bots are more intelligent than ever, so when they find two pieces of content that are identical, which one do you think they’re going to offer to searchers?

The one that’s been online longer.

That means you went to the trouble of populating your site with all these preexisting articles for nothing.

But it gets worse.

When the Googlebot figures out that you have identical content, they might even penalize your website. They do that by knocking the entire site (not just the copied pages) out of search engine results pages entirely.

Then nobody will find you.

The Best Alternative to Free Website Articles

Because you do need original content to survive online, start scratching out some ideas. You can write your copy yourself if you don’t have the budget to hire a writer.

Run it through the spellchecker and use something like Grammarly to make sure you’re not butchering it completely if you’re not a particularly talented wordsmith.

Just please, please, please… for your site’s sake, don’t use free articles on your website.