Article Marketing – Do You Know How to Get Around the Duplicate Content Penalty?

By C Doug Mah

Article marketing is an important and tried and true method of social marketing your business online but what do you do about the so-called “duplicate content penalty”? One of the main advantages for using article marketing is that it can help you with search engine optimizing your main website or blog by providing backlinks to your website or blog but how can you get the advantages when you have the threat of the duplicate content penalty. If you read on, I can help allay your fears and provide you with a strategy.

What Is Duplicate Content

The first thing you need to know is what is the duplicate content penalty. Google, at the time of this writing, is the number one search engine by search volume and conducts roughly two-thirds of all web searches. Therefore, it is important to know what Google says about duplicate content.

Here is what Google has to say: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.” (If this weren’t obviously a short quote from Google, this would be duplicate content!)

How Does Google Deal With Duplicate Content

In a nutshell, Google’s penalty is to lower the Page Rank of a page containing duplicate content or it simply doesn’t show up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google doesn’t send you a bill for the penalty and Google doesn’t blacklist your article. It simply doesn’t show up in the SERP. What does show up in the SERP is the web site page that contains the content that is on the web site with the highest Page Rank will be the page that gets ranked in the SERP. The other pages with the duplicate content don’t show up and for all intents and purposes don’t exist to most of the world.

How To Get Around the Duplicate Content Penalty

The key to getting around the duplicate content penalty is to understand what you are hoping to accomplish with your article marketing – your goals.

Creating Backlinks

A major component of search engine optimization is the creation of backlinks to your website or blog. Your success in getting search engine rankings is partially determined by how many websites link back to your website, how popular those linking websites are, and how relevant those linking websites are to your content and your website. Article marketing creates these backlinks with your resource box linking back to your website. As your articles get distributed all over the internet, you will be creating numerous back links. The key here is to create original and unique content exclusively for your website so that the duplicate content penalty doesn’t hurt your website. It’s OK to send articles written specifically for the article directories and for publishing in other people’s websites as this doesn’t affect you. You just want those all-important backlinks.

Here is a tip that will help with your backlinks. When you put the links with anchor text in your resource box of your article, make sure that when you are referring to a specific page on your website or even the homepage, always use the same format of the link. For example, if you use http://www.yourpage.com don’t also use http://yourpage.com or http://www.yourpage.com/index.html in your links as the search engine bots may view these all as different pages and dilute your Page Rank for all these pages.

In addition, the major article directories, like EzineArticles, have very high page rank in themselves so having your articles on their sites are going to create some valuable backlinks for you.

Also, for a short period of time, a number of these duplicate content articles will show up in the SERP until Google’s bots figure out that they are duplicate content and they will then slowly (or quickly) fade from the SERP.

Make sure you don’t try to use these articles that you are submitting as your actual content for Squidoo and HubPages as they each have their own duplicate content checkers.

Creating Credibility and Branding

Another goal of article marketing is creating credibility and branding. Having your articles out there on the internet either on article directories, ezines, and other websites increases your credibility in the marketplace. Your high quality valuable content will position you as an expert and increase your online brand. None of this is impacted by the duplicate content penalty.

Targeted Traffic to Your Website

Having content distributed widely over the internet with links back to your website is going to create traffic back to your website if your articles provide relevant valuable content. This works especially well if the websites that your articles are published on serve narrow market niches that pertain to your website. Again, this traffic is not impacted by the duplicate content liability.

I hope you got a better understanding of the duplicate content penalty from this article and that it is nothing to fear. If you know what your goals are for your article marketing campaigns, you can adapt your strategy to get around the duplicate content penalty.

If your goal is to get into article marketing or video marketing to help your business online, a great training ground is Renegade University. Mike Klingler's FREE membership site offers step-by-step, click-by-click, video tutorials on article marketing for network marketing.

About C Doug Mah

Doug is part of the “Super Guides” team with Renegade University and Renegade Professional, guiding and coaching in the area of internet attraction marketing.

Doug’s background is in finance and accounting in the corporate world.In the past 13 years, as a senior finance executive, he has helped grow and position 3 high-tech companies for acquisition.Having gone through the cycle of finding a new job, building a company, selling a company, integratng the company with the new company, and back to finding a job, and seeing what is happening in corporate America with the recent financial crisis and its fallout, Doug sees that future does not lie in corporate America.Developing your own business, You Inc., is the way to build your own economy of the future and secure you and your family financially.

For more tips and training on article marketing see Doug at http://www.RenegadeTrainerOnline.com/blog

Comments

[Pat Campbell]

One of the nuggets I extracted from this is to always use the same format for the link you use for your website.

How easy is it to copy and paste the URL of the homepage of your website with an index.html in it and insert it as a link, instead of thoughtfully using the exact same format consistently?

Thanks for that and making crystal clear how to avoid duplicate content penalty