Filling Up Content For A New News Publishing Site

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

Hello, SEO Gurus.

I have a client whom I've been working with for a few months now, and part of our service offering is to publish and promote fresh, daily content on his site's blog. This strategy has been a huge success thus far, he is very happy with the content, etc.

Now, he is getting ready to launch a second site, which will be a news publishing site for his industry niche, and we will once again be providing the content on a daily basis: we're going to be producing 10 to 15 articles a day. It's a big operation for us.

The client, however, is concerned that he doesn't want the site to appear "thin" on content in the early going, and asked if it would be possible to populate the new site with the articles we wrote on the other site's blog.

My gut reaction to this is that it would be an exceedingly bad idea to do this. While we are the ones who authored the original content (and we've used author tags and publishing markup), the best bet is to simply start fresh. Besides that, seeing as we'll be pumping out tons of content on a daily basis, it won't take long to fill up the content coffers.

That being said, I just wanted to run this past you all and see if anyone had any alternative ideas on how to use the old content without it being duplicate content. I was thinking that maybe designating all of the old articles with noindex, nofollow could be an option?

Many thanks in advance for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Mike

[EGOL]

the articles are not evergreen

I have a "news" area on one of my sites.  Instead of making the huge investment in authorship, I simply link with a comment to articles on other sites.  This allows me to provide four, six, eight, ten items per day in just an hour.  Writing (at least for me) would take a very long time.

If there is enough news in your niche and you can select the valuable stories then your site could become the "go to" location for people to keep up with the news.  In my opinion, the human aggregator with some commentary is better than the robots.

If you do a good job and allow people to subscribe by RSS  and email you might build up an extensive list of industry subscribers.  Once you do that the stories will start coming to you instead of you hunting for them.

[RCNOnlineMarketing]

Many thanks - all of these comments have been great. I should clarify: 1) the articles are not evergreen; they are/were topical news articles. 2) The client's primary website is not a news/publishing site, but rather a lead generation site for his recruitment business. His new web property is essentially a completely different business endeavor: a niche publishing site. We've been using blogging on his lead generation site as a means of fast-tracking his search engine visibility and drawing in readers from his target demographic who can/could in turn become conversions. With the new site, We'll be driving web traffic to the site, and he'll be monetizing it vis a vis ads.

[OnlineMarketingGuy]

Agree. Rethink the strategy entirely.

[EGOL]

I like both of the suggestions given by Online Marketing Guy and Anita Clark.  Both are great ideas.

Online Marketing Guy's idea is fast and low cost.  Anita's is high quality and an investment.

Before deciding I would look at the traffic coming into these articles.  Are they getting traffic, are they earning links, is the traffic valuable.  If the answer is "NO" then maybe a greater investment in content is not going to pay.

Now.... if this site belonged to me and I wanted to produce "news for an industry niche"... I sure would not build a second website.  I would add that news to a blog on my primary site.

Divide and conquer has been a battle plan since the beginning of history.  You are doing this for your enemy.   Instead, unite the clans.

[Anita_Clark]

Since all the research has already been accomplished, why not re-write the old articles (not spun) with a fresh outlook/viewpoint/call-to-action and have the best of both worlds...lots of quickly created content that you are not afraid of indexing?

[OnlineMarketingGuy]

It's only duplicate content if it's indexed. So, you could noindex those pages, but, I would still keep a watchful eye in Google to see if they do or do not get indexed.

Also, since your not looking for an SEO benefit from these fluffer articles, put them in one category you will never use, and each month check to see if you have any pages indexed in that category. If Google does index them, then just use GWT to deindex that category and then you won't have to worry about it.