Duplicate Content Question

by Jack Humphrey on Jul 7

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

It seems that the duplicate content “penalty” myth just won’t die any time soon.  Once again, an example of a new marketer getting misled about duplicate content and a so-called “penalty” imposed by Google.

Question:

I was wondering if you could explain something for me. First of all I should say
I am a complete newbie.

I am just starting with article marketing as a traffic generation source because
I understand it and it makes sense to me.

I want to start to submit my articles to the various articles directories you
have listed on your site
http://www.fridaytrafficreport.com/top-21-the-best-article-directory-list/

However someone has told me that google will penalize me, for duplicate content,
if I submit the same article to different directories.

If I write 10 articles…can I post that group of articles to each of the
different directories i.e. post all 10 articles to ezinearticles.com and then
post the exact same 10 articles on submityourarticle.com without penalty for
posting duplicate content on different directories?

There is no Google duplicate content penalty.  What happens is Google, wherever it sees an article first, will likely defer to that URL for ranking purposes.  The rest of the time it sees that exact article, it will blow it off.  Since Google makes money by having a diverse and rich selection of different types of content in it’s results, it doesn’t want all top 10 results to be the same article on different sites.

The main purpose of article syndication is not to get into the top 10 listings with every iteration of the same article.  It is 1)  to get direct traffic from the places you syndicate that article and 2)  to get any link love back to your site with your article’s signature.

The only people who call not getting all 10 spots in the top 10 a penalty are people who are trying to manipulate Google in a way they’ve long since fixed.

Just syndicate your articles for direct traffic and backlinks to your main site.  There is no penalty related to duplicate content other than the fact that Google won’t list the same content in it’s results if it has already chosen which copy of the article it wants to rank.

Related articles…

Tagged as: duplicate content

  • http://myfreexbox360kinect.com Josiah @ Free kinect

    Hi Jack,

    I see where your coming from and i agree that you should feel free to submit the same article to any other site. Heck, sites like Tumblr have reblog features where the whole post is duplicated. The only think i have noticed is that if one article is exactly the same as another on two different sites or more than it has the tendency to not even be indexed.

    One could argue that a page not indexed is a page with a backlink that isn’t being counted(not necessarily my argument.)
    .-= Josiah @ Free kinect´s last blog ..Microsoft Kinect Marketing Images Leaked =-.

  • http://blogreaction.com/ Aaron@Free Blogs

    Great post Jack. I’ve gone over this many time with my friends, and they never seem to “get” the duplicate content ranking system. It doesn’t hurt to have the same content listed in multiple places.. news aggregators do it all over the place. The highest ranking (and sometimes that means the oldest) page with the content will win in the SERPs — it’s that simple (most of the time). It will be interesting to see what happens as they include more time-period relevancy into search results.
    .-= Aaron@Free Blogs´s last blog ..Free Blogs =-.

  • http://www.sqlsteps.com Alex@SQL Training

    Thanks for providing this excellent explanation about Duplicate Content. I have always been afraid of Google’s duplicate content penalty but now I wont be

  • http://krisroxas.com Kris

    I was actually wondering about this, and I was leaning more towards your answer than getting slapped. Good to see other people think the same :p
    .-= Kris´s last blog ..Wow… My Servers Actually Crashed =-.

  • http://www.seoppcplus.com/blog Debbie

    Great post. I too have clients asking me about duplicate content, and there really is a lot of misleading information out there.

    One piece of information I would add to this post is the use of Canonical. If a client needs to use the same content on multiple pages on his site(s) then he can ‘inform’ the search engines which page should be indexed. This is done by adding in the section of the duplicate page.
    .-= Debbie´s last blog ..How to Increase Adwords Quality Score =-.

  • Jac Visser

    Thought so… what’s the use of some good content if only allowed once and not to go viral. Wonder who started that rumor?

  • http://www.cashflowduplication.com/blog Nicholas Wind

    Excellent answer Jack.
    It’s about value to others..which I learned from you
    and my mentors.
    Duplicate content is no problem from what I’ve seen.
    It’s actually been good to me.
    I ask myself when I post on my marketing blog
    …will this post create value and teach something?
    We have many many new folks to help now
    and in the future .
    Maybe because I’m 54 years young and have
    developed patience that I never feel I must slam
    folks with my links.
    I see this on all social sites.
    What a turn off.

    HEY HEY PLEASE BUY MY STUFF..EVEN THOUGH
    I’M NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU ANY VALUE!!

    Common sense again from you Jack.
    .-= Nicholas Wind´s last blog ..Why Most Network Marketers Do Zero Retail Business =-.

  • http://wiity.blogspot.com/ Patrick@Reverse Phone Lookup

    Hi Jack!! First of all that Duplicate Content Penalty is a complete myth.The reality though is not very different.Google simple hates duplicate content but they will not penalize your site (by following the link in the resource box of your article) for duplicate content.But what will happen is that ,if you submit the same article to 10 directories (say) then Google spider will only index your first article and after that if they find the same article on other article directories then they will simply not index it again.So even if you submit the same article to tons of article directories,only the article which is discovered first by the Google spiders will be indexed.Your site will not be penalized.

  • http://www.biggerpockets.com Joshua Dorkin @ Real Estate Investing

    Good post, Jack. The problem many sites have, though, is when a site syndicating their content ranks higher than their site. I suppose that isn’t an issue if you write unique content for the article directories as opposed to that which is intended for your sites exclusively.

  • http://fatburningdietsandworkouts.com Joe

    So Jack my question would be if Google ignores duplicate article then it wouldn’t make sense to say submit the same article to more than one directory? Also I have heard (maybe it was here) to at least change the title and the first and last paragraph?

    Thanks Joe

    • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ Jack Humphrey

      You still want to syndicate your articles, and you want to change them up a little for each site posted to, for direct traffic and the possibility of getting published in newsletters and on, say, blogs where people look for easy content to post. But it has to be quality.

  • http://mobiadvice.ru/ Mobi

    Wow, thank you very much, just what I wanted!

  • http://www.hgh.info/ Joel@Growth hormone

    Jack, Nice Article. Another strategy people use is to spun them. By using synonyms of one word. That sometime makes the whole article entirely different. But the problem with such article is punctual and grammer errors and often rejected by quality article directories like ezine, isnare etc..

    Google especially had supplemental index to easily judge what is original (or atleast indexed first) from any website. I suppose they no longer have such index now. They don’t index dup content anymore.

  • http://edocster.blogspot.com/ Sean Kinn

    Best explanation of the “duplicate copy” myth I’ve seen to date. Man, you guars are great, keep up the good work. SK
    .-= Sean Kinn´s last blog ..Differentiating between Web 20 Freelance Editing and Writing =-.

  • http://kaiserthesage.com Jason @ SEO Strategies

    There’s no such thing when it comes to article directories. But if contents published on your site has duplicates, there you will have those penalties, and yes there are penalties for duplicate contents, if the author bio is disregarded. that’s why it’s ok for blogs to fetch articles from article submission sites, but they have to include the authors’ links, right? because bots still refer to the original content (the first one to get indexed), if some links are missing from the original content, then there the problem will start. trust me, I’ve experienced this penalty first hand and this actually happened with squidoo a few months ago. If you publish posts from your site to squidoo, your site will banish from all of its current SERP rankings, because they favor the authority of squidoo, and that’s going to hurt you a lot. it’s best to keep your duplicate contents only on article directories, and protect your site’s contents!
    .-= Jason @ SEO Strategies´s last blog ..95-237 Unique Visitors Overnight – Without SEO =-.

  • http://georgearthurburks.com George Arthur Burks

    There does seem to be a lot of misunderstanding about duplicate copy. I post my articles to my blog before I submit them to an article directory.

    And correct me if I am wrong, but the only duplicate copy penalty is if duplicate copy is found within the same URL ssequence so people won’t create 100 pages with the same content to get a higher ranking in the search engines.

    Good stuff
    .-= George Arthur Burks´s last blog ..Join the Ultimate Blog Challenge =-.

    • http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ Jack Humphrey

      @George – yep, you’re right on target there.

  • http://www.kaltschaum-matratze.com Andi

    Hey Jack, I was wondering about this issue for quite a while. Thanks for the great explanation.

    I’m submitting my articles only to german article directorys, because my site is in german. There are like 5 good article directorys, and they kinda work together and it’s generally very hard to have your article accepted. So if you submit the same article to more of them it’s very likely that you get banned.
    .-= Andi´s last blog ..MALIE 7 Zonen Kaltschaummatratze im Test =-.

  • http://lubobg.com/ Sean@Рекламни материали

    When Google sees duplicate content they just choose one of all duplicates to rank on #1. It does not matter if it is the original, it just must be the most relevant and most linked. All google cares about is delivering the best copy to the users.

  • http://www.chucksim.com/blog Chuck

    I have found that posting an article on http://ezinearticles.com/ , which has a higher authority than other article submission directories, first, helps get a better listing from search results. Once your article is indexed by the search engines post your article in other directories. Duplication is not an issue. Getting a higher authority is.
    .-= Chuck´s last blog ..Local Marketing… =-.

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  • http://www.weycrest.co.uk Paul Lee

    If you really are worried about this, you can always spin the articles. You can use various tools but spend a bit of time and rewrite the articles. Not just replacing words and titles but a proper rewrite. I usually outsource this, pretty cheaply. Sometimes I have pushed similar articles to various blogs, and its interesting which blogs Google tends to “favour” though it might just be that the Googlebot, found that blog first! I have a few blogs that take content from Unique Article Wizard, which spins the articles in a special way and its clear from the webstats that my blogs have been getting ranked for them (mainly on long tail keywords).
    .-= Paul Lee´s last blog ..VPSNET releases cPanel Plugin to allow use of VPSNET Anycast DNS =-.

  • http://TheNetworkMarketing.com Gail@NetworkMarketingBlog

    Great post. I too have been afraid of the “duplicate content penalty”. I’ve been focusing on article marketing and use UAW but it sounds like I’ve been spending too much time on making the “spins” too different… which ends up hurting the quality.
    Thanks for the great info.
    .-= Gail@NetworkMarketingBlog´s last blog ..Your Real Business Is Not Your Business =-.

  • http://cisco-ccnacertification.blogspot.com karl

    very good explanation on duplicate content ,in my line of field where i write on Cisco there are lot of generic phrases that cannot be changed then there is no option but to put them on site.

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  • http://twitter.com/SEO__Company SEO PRO

    Does google recognize the backlink in duplicate articles?

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