Top and tailing an article is probably the easiest way to make an article seem to be unique. In fact, of course, the article itself is unchanged all that is done is to add some content above and below.

The fact that an item is actually unchanged is one good reason to use this strategy with syndicated content from article directories. The webmaster can write a brief commentary on the article, give his impressions and spin and yet not break the rules about leaving article directory, syndicated content unchanged. Because search engines currently tend to consider the whole page in their duplicate content calculations this can be an efffective method of managing the duplicate content issue. The important factor here is to add context to the article so that there is a reason to show your article to readers instead of another version.

For example, if you have picked up an article on glue to put into your model aircraft site. If you simply place the article, with no commentary or additions, all the search engines will see is the content about glue and thus relegate it to the rest of the copies of the same article. But, if you write a commentary and relate why glue is relevant to model aircraft – how it is used to fix models together and why this articles is relevant to model aircraft makers then you have unique content available nowhere else (unless another model aircraft site has the same article and almost identical commentary…)

Problems with top and tailing: Too often people use top and tailing with cheap (or free) automatic scripts that simply insert templated paragraphs with little or no relevance to the content above or below. This can be picked up by search engines relatively easily and thus may have the opposite effect to that hoped for – imagine getting your page relegated because of the number of times that a particular intro paragraph has been posted! This form of uniqeifiying in probably the least effective method and seems to be dying out as search engines and users catch on to the problems it causes.

Conclusion: When used correctly top and tailing can be a very effective way to get extra mileage from content that has been used elsewhere. It can sidestep the duplicate content filters imposed by most search engines. The downside is that to do it properly takes quite a long time. The commentaries have to be written for each article and by hand. Templated solutions are not effective

I have been using Content Composer to create commentaries for my syndicated articles. One can simply cut and paste a syndicated article into the editing panel and then write, with the aid of Content Composer’s keyword relevancy tools, a commentary that refocuses the whole page onto the site’s specific theme. With Content Composer I can, in about 30 minutes write themed commentaries for the whole of a niche portal built around syndicated content. Much faster than writing a single article (for me at least) and yet as effective in SEO  and readability terms.

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