Do Your Article Submissions Create Duplicate Content Problems?
Fri, Jan 25, 2008
I think every new blogger has the same initial experience. It goes something like this…
Infant Blogger - “What is Blog?”
Day 1: You learn about blogging from one of the many blogging experts on the net and think, “hey, I can do that!”
Day 2: You find your niche, pick a blog platform and agonize over theme selection (not realizing that theme selection will turn out to be the easiest of the blogging tasks).
Day 3: You sit down to write your first post, stare at the monitor for 30 minutes or so and then end up rewriting the first paragraph several times.
Day 23: About 3 weeks later, after you’ve summoned all the journalistic skill you’ve saved up since high school, you’ve painfully hatched about 10 posts that you would not be too embarrassed to own up to if someone at work stumbled across your blog.
Day 23 1/2: You check your “stats” and discover that you’ve had ZERO visitors in 3 weeks.
Beginner Blogger - “Your Blog Is A Deserted Island”
So, as you ponder your purpose for sharing and decide that it’s time to invite a few people to your private blog island, you head back to the guru who told you about this whole blogging experiment.
Fortunately he has a great ebook all about ways to announce your blog to thousands of wildly interested readers… free of charge. Well, that is after you pay him $27 for the ebook.
This sounds like a deal and your Paypal account takes the hit.
The ebook introduces you to “Article Marketing” and explains how to submit your post (articles - same thing) to article directories and share your content on loads of other web sites.
In return for sharing your content, you get your little “bio”, which usually consists if a blurb about you and link back to your blog, inserted at the bottom of your article on each web site that chooses to display it. (You’re welcome - if you did not know what article marketing was before now, I just saved you $27.)
Intermediate Blogger - “Wait a Minute, What About Duplicate Content?”
Now your really cranking! The blog posts are sweet, and each gets some action on the various article directories you have submitted to.
You check and, sure enough, you’ve got backlinks! Lots of your article are swimming through the internet.
“Wow! Article submissions really pay off… I’ll be quitting my job any day now!”, you think to yourself.
And then it hits you… You realize that for the last few weeks you have orchestrated a massive smack of duplicate content, with your name and URL all over it.
You knew about duplicate content but were thinking it didn’t apply to you because your content is original… “it’s those pesky plagerizers and spammers that get punished by the duplicate content cops, right?”
You didn’t think about all your “copied and pasted” word-for-word article jamming the net. “oh, that sinking feeling…”
Enlightened Intermediate Blogger - “No worries mate”
Good news… Don’t worry about duplicate content.
According to Google, there is no “penalty” for promoting, publishing or otherwise submitting duplicate content.
The search engines do FILTER out duplicate content so only one instance of an article will show on the search engine results page (SERP).
So, let’s say you were a super-submitter and now have 50+1 versions of the same post spanning the net (that’s 50 copy-paste versions and one original).
Which one will Google show when a relevant search is performed?
Will it be the original? Will it be the most recent version? Hmmm…
The answer is… Google shows the one with the most backlinks.
This could be the original (yours) but often times it’s one from an article directory.
So, what’s the point of article marketing? Why submit all those posts?
Well, really, the main reason article marketing is necessary is to create backlinks.
So, to guarantee that your version of the artcle ALWAYS has the most backlinks and thus gets displayed by Google, be sure to use that article’s URL (not your homepage) in the “bio” for that article.
This way, everytime that article is copied and pasted into someone else’s web site, your page with the exact same content will get a backlink and a little more “juice” from Google.
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Tags: article marketing, blogger, blogging, duplicate content, getting-backlinks
Blogging
January 25th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Heya!
Great article and definitely important information for article marketers to know.
To be honest, I wasn’t QUITE sure how Google et al decided which entry of an article actually gets ranked… the first place it sees it (when that page got spidered), the site it appears on that has the highest PR, or - as you indicated - the copy with the most inbound links.
One way around that might be to write up the article, then rewrite it and use that second version to submit to all the directories.
Also, you could make the submitted article 9incomplete’ and end with a teaser that leads them to click on the link in its ‘author resource box’ to get the rest of the information.
For example, have an article called “3 ways to get rid of an ant hill”, then end with “… and for 2 more highly controversial ways to get rid of an ant hill very simply, click on the link below.”
That could lead the full article on your own website “5 ways to get rid of an ant hill” (maybe use the link with a html bookmark so the page loads right where tip #4 starts), where readers can find out the remaining two tips .. and perhaps also buy whatever product or service is being sold on your site,click on an AdSense ad, sign up for a newsletter or to an RSS feed, etc.
And fyi to you and your readers, I have a free resource page that lists a whack of article directories ranked by Google PR. There’s also a section for niche article directories which are also valuable to submit articles to if they have a similar theme to that site.
I linked my name here to that page if you’re interested.
Regards,
- Steve
January 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Steve,
Impressive tips!
Thanks for sharing your expertise and offering up the free resource.
Deeter
January 28th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Steve,
Your tips are very helpful. Thank you.
Ben