Duplicate filtering seems to be applied different ways depending on the type of content. I’ve read some speculation about it. As best as I can tell their algorithm seems to work based on content chunks of about 12-18 words and percentage of duplication on the page as a whole.

Using ezines i went from pr0 to pr3 in six months.

While I agree with your overall point, that a site and pages can be optimized to avoid penalties to some degree, Google’s legion of young, cappuccino swilling, Wii playing, engineers and their algorithms are pretty capricious these days. I’d rather not risk it for a niche blog that I want to stick around a while and bring in search traffic reliably. It’s all in how far you want to push the envelope.

I’d also agree that recommendations and reputation are important when it comes to writers for hire (same is true of coders). However, most I’ve seen advertising on webmaster forums and “for hire” sites haven’t been that good. Caveat Emptor.

There are also several good article writers for hire, you just have to know who to use. Asking for recommendation from your contacts is often a good idea.

Another thing you can do in Google that I forgot to mention is you can use the “site:” switch. For example, if you wanted to look up government sources on horses you would enter “horses site:.gov”

Just google “government information sites” without quotes and you find a host of sites that you can use.

The information found on these sites depending on the topic are typically more accurate and authoratative than a lot of the stuff found on Wikepedia. The government pays millions and millions of dollars of our tax money every year to generate these reports and studies, so the quality is typicall very high.

Government sources aren’t really indexed in one central place, particularly when it comes to state government information. That’s why I’d recommend using Google to search for them or going to a particular department or office’s home page and doing a search from there. You can also try the Library of Congress for info on a lot of subjects, particularly historical ones.

Wikipedia is a good way to find links to additional source material and to research potential niches. But, using material from it directly isn’t recommended. It’s scrapped a lot and Google is quick to deindex sites that do this. You have to extensively rewrite content from it for it to work well.

What about Wikipedia? How should their content be used?