The Dilemma of Duplicate Content
I’ve done a whole lot of reading about duplicate content lately to try to find out once and for all how duplicate content is viewed by the web in general and ultimately by search engines. I wanted to know if it’s really bad or if it’s rather good for our site and overall campaigns.
When an internet marketing subject has bugged me long enough, I take the bull by the horns and do an extensive search and lots and lots of reading on the subject.
Personally I am very possessive of my own articles (the ones that I write for myself) and I don’t like to give them to some submittal machines. I like to control the whole process of my articles being submitted. I’ve also always felt awkward to submit the same article over and over to the different directories. As a matter of fact I’ve never done it. However, I really wanted to find out if my feelings were well founded or not.
So, all in all, after much research, I am now if ever convinced that duplicating your article on different directories is technically NOT allowed. In other words, it’s not allowed. The reason why people get away with it's because the page looks different from one directory to another, with different ads and content around your article, the search engine doesn’t always recognize your article as duplicate. When it does, however, it will deny you the back link for that duplicate article.
Another thing will happen if you spread the same article all over directories, is that eventually you might be seen as a duplicate content distributor, more than article writer. Article directories do not appreciate having duplicate articles posted on their sites. Plainly and frankly, they just don’t.
Your articles are much more valuable when they are unique. If you do not want to rewrite a whole article use the same article by tweaking its content, especially the introduction and conclusion, to change the content of the article around and therefore create new content. Bottom line, do everything you can to avoid multiple duplicate content.
When trying to figure out issues such as this I really only look at what the best sites in the business are doing.
Ezinearticles IS the #1 article site whether people like them or not and if they thought having articles that are published first on Ezines would be hurt in the ranking by letting other sites republish them they simply would not be doing it.
if you think about it the Drudge Report is nothing but duplicate content, as is all the article directories some of which just pickup articles from other directories, and most news sites all carry the same information.
If duplicate content was a problem why would anyone post their article to a directory, the whole point is to get your article listed in as many places as you can in order to get one way back links.
Google rewards the sites that have a lot of back links to them, most of the back links come from information from your sites by way of RSS feeds or articles that have been picked up and posted to other locations.
To make my point, I think it was 2 years ago I buit a site for the $1000 Challenge here at WA, the entire site was made up of duplicate content and PLR articles in 5 days the site was index.
In 6 days it had 24 pages index and after about 30 days it had 15 page one listing on Google for my keywords, again this was all duplicate content.
So from my testing it does not hurt in any way.
Withholding information for the sake of trying to avoid duplication, which will automatically occur in the long run anyway, seems a little too self serving as opposed to reaching out for the greater good. If you produce content that is of value to an audience, get it out there.
