If you are just starting up a blog or website of your own and find yourself struggling to write content for your readers, you can find thousands of free articles online that you can post to your website. If you look in the right places, it is perfectly legal to repost articles that other people have written to your own website. Many people write articles specifically for this purpose, to be distributed to bloggers and reposted around the web. There are several websites which host articles online for you to browse through and do as you wish with, provided you follow a few rules.
While this may sound too good to be true, there are a few catches to using free articles online. Most of the articles online that are available for you to use are distributed with a specific license attached to them; you must usually repost the article exactly as it is written originally, including all links and citations. From a search engine optimization standpoint, this has a few drawbacks. One is that, when using free articles online, your website will be hosting the same exact content as several other websites; search engines look down on this practice and will list your website further down on the search results page because of this. Having website content that is identical to the content of other web pages places your website behind other sites that host original content that can not be found elsewhere on the web.
Many of the articles online available for republishing are saturated with links, which the original author uses to promote his or her own website. When bloggers repost the author’s article, the original author gains a higher ranking with search engines because of the number of links to the author’s own page. Search engines rank favorably sites that have numerous other sites linking to them, so the original author of the article stands to benefit greatly from your use of his or her article online on your website. Some bloggers use this to their advantage; it is very difficult, or even impossible, to prevent your content from being stolen by unscrupulous bloggers or automated scripts. Some people take advantage of this by actually allowing their works to be reposted on other websites by filling their content with links to their own pages, so that when their content is reprinted, they gain search engine ranking.