The Public Domain Goldmine - A Content Solution

There’s been a bit of a content feeding frenzy going on since 2006. Gone are the days when webmasters were able to use SEO (search engine optimization) tricks such as Blogging and Pinging, or Cloaking / Smart pages to drive traffic to their websites from the search engines. Yes, some of these techniques may still work, but not for long. The search engines are getting smarter by the day, and webmasters are likewise ‘wise-ing’ up and lifting their game in order to create long term traffic solutions for their websites.

Hence, we are seeing a boom in so called ‘private label’ article and content membership sites, a growth spurt in article directories, and in many webmasters turning to freelancing websites and hiring ghost-writers to write content for them.

But one has to question how viable and long-term some of these content solutions will be moving forward. As stated, the search engines are getting smarter by the day. They are discounting duplicate content, and most SEO experts agree that Google is already factoring in LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing into their ranking algorithms. In a nutshell, LSI is used to determine the likelihood of common words and phrases appearing together for a particular topic.

For example, content on ‘dogs’ would likely contain related keywords such as ‘puppies’, ‘breeds’, ‘pets’, ‘canine’ and so on. By analyzing the verbiage used in content, Google can not only determine the theme of a website, but more importantly can try to ascertain the authority of, or expertise within the content.

As is widely known, Google have an ongoing project to digitize the world's books in order to make them easier for people to find and buy. They have forged agreements with major universities to access and digitize their libraries. One rumour is that Google is using artificial intelligence to analyze all of this content and feed it back into their LSI algorithm to help it to determine what is authoritative expert content versus what is simply keyword focused and less authoritative content.

Now that I have covered a brief overview of what is happening with search engine intelligence, let’s take a look at the content solutions that many webmasters are using to populate their pages, and let’s examine these solutions in light of the search engine changes which are occurring to determine the pros and cons of each solution.

A)  Content Solution 1 – Third Party Articles

This is easiest content to source. Here a webmaster simply goes to any one of the many article directories such as ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, or articlecity.com, performs a keyword search on their chosen topic, and voila – chances are that there are some articles there on the topic you are looking for which you can simply grab and add to your own pages providing you retain the resource box at the bottom of the article, which includes a link back to the original author’s website.

The problem with this solution is that, although it is the quickest, the chances are that others have already gotten in before you and have also made use of that article on their websites. The search engines will pick up the fact that the content on your pages is not original and unique, and they will downgrade the rankings for your pages as a consequence, hence making it tougher for you to get visitors to your pages through organic search results in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

B)  Content Solution 2 – Private Label Content

There are a plethora of so called ‘private label’ membership and article sites out there, with new ones popping up every week. This is also a quick and relatively cheap solution for content.

The problem is that you really need to modify your content to make it unique, otherwise you will face the same duplicate content penalty as you would by using third party articles. Making your articles unique can take a bit of time, but it is still quicker than researching and writing your content from scratch.

You face one other potential problem though, and that is a problem of quality. Much private label content has been outsourced to ghost-writers who are paid on a per article or number of words basis. The industry is highly competitive, hence there are price pressures for these freelancers to keep their prices low in order for them to be awarded the job. On low, competitive rates, these writers cannot afford to spend oodles of time researching the subject matter. And they may be writing on a subject that they have little or no knowledge about!

The speed with which they need to research, write and deliver their content impacts on quality, and although a certain article may read fine, an expert on that topic may well chuckle at the amateur conclusions drawn and recognize that it has not been written by someone with an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter.

“What do I care?” you might think – it’s good enough for most visitors and it’s still good enough for the search engines. My answer is, in 2006 probably yes. What about later in 2007, or in 2008 once all three, Google, Yahoo and MSN have adopted and perfected their LSI algorithms? How long term do you want your content strategy, and your flow of traffic, to be?

C) Content Solution 3 – Outsource/Hire A Ghost-Writer

Here you have more control than with private label articles. You can try to find a freelance writer with pre-existing knowledge of the subject matter that you want your articles or a book written on. You can also put some effort into finding a writer who is really good at their job.

There are still some pitfalls and disadvantages though:

1. You need to trust or otherwise verify that they have indeed authored the content that they are giving you and not just copied it from the public domain or from private label content, and made a few modifications

2. You need to trust that they won’t redistribute the content they wrote for you to another client, even with some modifications

3. Managing your ghost-writer can take time

4. Finding a good freelance writer can take some time, and you may have to go through a few rotten apples before you can locate one that you are happy to work with on an ongoing basis

5. This is the most expensive option of the three content solutions looked at so far

Ok, so what about Option D… sourcing content from the public domain?

D) Content Solution 4 – The Public Domain Goldmine

The public domain refers to creative works that are not, or are no longer, subject to United States copyright law. Such works are not limited to books, but can include any creative work such as movies, plays, music, sketches, courses, reports, posters, photographs or drawings.

Under United States copyright law, all works published prior to 1923 fall into the public domain, and a large percentage of works published up until 1963 also falls into the public domain, this where the initial copyright has not been renewed. Further, many US government publications are also in the public domain by default.

What advantages does the public domain content solution hold?

1. Public domain information is freely available for you to use and republish. You can freely modify it. You can put your name to it as the author, whether you have modified it or not

2. Most public domain books have been written by experts on the subject matter they have written about. This ensures authoritative and high quality content, which will likely meet the ‘expert verbiage’ test of the search engines’ LSI algorithms both now and into the future.

3. By searching yourself for an old book on your chosen topic, and having it scanned into a digital format yourself, your chances or running into a duplicate content issue with somebody else who has digitized and republished the exact same book is very slim to say the least. You can almost be assured of unique content.

4. You can either take that digitized content and republish it as entire book or ebook, thereby creating your own expert product minus all the research and writing, or you can split the book up into articles for content pages for your site. Or you can do both at the same time!

What disadvantages does the public domain content solution hold?

Whilst public domain content is itself free, you still have to go and find books on your chosen subject matter.

1. Once you have found them, and unless they are published before 1923, you will have to perform some copyright research to ensure that they are indeed in the public domain.

2. The best public domain works you will find will be the ones published from the 1940’s through to 1963. This because the language is largely contemporary. Pre-1923 books were written in an archaic form of English, and will require editing and re-writing for today’s readers. So you are faced with either performing the copyright research on a more modern book, or re-wording the verbiage of a pre-1923 work.

3. Once your copyright research has given you the all clear, you then need to scan the book in order to convert it into a digital format.

These three steps can be quite time consuming, and are an impediment to finding and using public domain content. However, there are software tools to fast-track this process. One such tool is Wendy Woudstra's Public Domain Explorer program which makes uncovering public domain books in any niche as simple as typing in a few keywords. It not only finds pre-1963 books and pamphlets related to your chosen keyword search, it also searches several online copyright renewal databases to see if it can find whether the copyright on any post 1923 book has been renewed.

Another less expensive program, but which includes different features, is the Public Domain Expert Toolbar. Whilst the Public Domain Expert toolbar doesn't perform a copyright search for you, it will greatly facilitate your research, not only for finding public domain books, articles, films, music and artwork, but also for researching the legal aspects of re-using public domain content. It facilitates your search for public domain content on any given topic by linking you to a plethora of different public domain content and research websites.

The public domain is my primary choice of content for my content sites. I do edit the public domain content that I use, but this is much quicker than researching and writing my articles from scratch. Public Domain content is almost always professional, authoritative, in depth and written by an expert on his/her subject matter, and therefore will likely satisfy Google’s LSI criteria. It is also almost always unique content, unless I use content from a common source that has already been republished online.

Conclusion

So in summary, this article has addressed four common sources of content for web pages or ebooks, namely:

1. Using third party articles

2. Using private label content

3. Hiring a ghost-writer

4. Or republishing Public Domain content

We have briefly covered the quality changes afoot with the search engines, and highlighted the fact that to rank well in the long term, your content pages really need to be unique, and they need to satisfy the search engines’ internal latent semantic guidelines, and therefore your content needs to be authoritative and contain the verbiage that only an expert writing on a given subject can really have.

We have melded these two questions, and come to the conclusion that tapping into the goldmine of content available in the public domain is a very intelligent, low cost and viable source of unique and authoritative content for a large range of topics (obviously, you are not going to find anything on contemporary subjects such as Plasma TV’s!).

Finally, I have suggested a couple of software tools to facilitate and fast-track the process of finding public domain content for a given niche, and for looking up copyright information. The first of these programs, Wendy Woudstra's Public Domain Explorer, allows you to conduct keyword searches and does a preliminary check on each returned work to see whether it can find any record of a copyright renewal. The second of these programs, the Public Domain Expert Toolbar, will speed up and facilitate your search for all types of public domain content.

Here’s to your success in also making use of the goldmine of works that exist in the public domain as a solution to your content needs.

Warmly,

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