Article Submission: How to Avoid the Duplicate Content Penalty

Article Submission: How to Avoid the Duplicate Content Penalty

Article submission is an important aspect of article marketing, and if you know how to avoid the duplicate content penalty when you write articles then you have a very powerful tool at your disposal. Many people do not understand the term 'duplicate content' as applied by Google in particular, so here is some guidance to help you.

So why 'Google' particularly? Simply because Google is the top search engine bar none, and more people use Google as a search engine than any other. many people use other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft)for specific purposes such as email services, but Google is by far the most widely preferred for straight keyword-based information retrieval. However, there is also that much misunderstood duplicate content penalty that article submission can involve. Or so most believe!

When you want a web page listed on a search engine - any search engine - always write with Google in mind, but also naturally with the reader in mind, and you will achieve what you are seeking to achieve. Part of achieving that involves being aware of the requirements of specifc Google algorithms, such as its latent sematic indexing (LSI) algorithm, and the PageRank calculation based upon the quantity and quality of other web pages linked to yours, and structuring your article to conform to them - not page rank).

Even with all of that, however, article submission to a number of ezines and article directories is essential if you are to maximize the probability of your article being listed on Page #1 of Google for the keyword it is optimized on. This surprises many people - the fact that an article can be listed, let alone listed highly. Many believe that the main benefits of writing articles are to have people read them on the directories and the back links to their website that articles can provide.

While both of these are significant benefits, of much more value is having the article itself listed on Google, along with the link to your website contained in the 'Author's Resource' section. Your article is published on its own page by each directory, and that can be listed in the same way as any other web page can be. In fact, due to the high number of links such article pages can have pointing to them, unless you are very good at SEO then you will have more chance of getting a Page #1 listing of a published article than were it contained on a page in your website.

Where the potential duplicate content penalty comes in is when you submit your article to more than one article directory. These are considered duplicates so your article will be penalized, right? Wrong! In fact, and this is confirmed by Google, there is no such thing as a penalty for duplicate content, and here is how the misconception occurs.

Google's customers are those that use the search engine for information. They aren't people like you and I that use the search engine for advertising, or even those that pay for Google Adwords PPC advertising, but are people using Google to find information using specific search terms or 'keywords'. Google want to provide as good a service as possible to its customers, and to offer numbers of web pages containing exactly the same content is failing to achieve that.

What happens, then, is that Google will ultimately list only one web page containing any specific article. However, it takes time to achieve that. The initial result could be that several listings of the same article could be acquired, getting there by virtue of the SEO applied both by you in your article and by the directory. Over a period of time your listings will gradually be dropped until you have only one listing of of a web page containing each article, with a consequent reduction in the PageRank provided to your listed Resource web page. However, this doesn't happen immediately.

You can do as I do and submit your article to over 400 different article directories and ezines and have them published in them all. Each of these will provide you with PageRank and each can theoretically be published on Google with no duplicate content penalty. Through time they will drop off Google's listings and your PageRank will fall.

In order to compensate for that, my article submission strategy is to write and submit a different article every couple of weeks using an article submission service. That compensates for any pages dropped from the listings and also gets you a net PageRank gain because you are publishing new articles faster than Google is dropping them. In fact, you can use two different strategies.

a) You can write a different version of the article each time, using the same keywords and Resource URL, so that you maintain and even improve your listing for that keyword and your URL listing in Google, or

b) You can write a new article using different keywords but the same URL, and hopefully get Google listings for a variety of keywords while maintaining and even improving your PageRank for you web page.

Each has its advantages: strategy a) offers you the chance to obtain multiple listings of the same article for the same keyword, maximizing the likelihood of a searcher clicking to your article, while b) enables you to achieve one listing on each of several different results pages, thus exposing your article once to a number of different searches or keywords. I do both!

One of the implications of this way of looking at duplicate content is that your blog postings can be copied and submitted to article directories, although they are best to be written to a minimum of 500 words to be sure of publication in most dirctories. This article submission strategy is used by many people, and while it is technically classed as duplicate content, it takes some time for Google to start dropping the duplicate pages. Irrespective of what others might tell you, you will not be banned from any directory or search engine for doing this: it is common practice.