The Great Duplicate Content Myth

I hope this article I wrote today sparks some debate on the subject. Looking at first hand results and determining facts based on evidence are the goal.

The Great Duplicate Content Myth

A wide spread Theory in the SEO world states that duplicate content not only carries a heavy penalty, but in fact can and will lead to a domain being banned or deindexed. Today I am going to discuss why I believe that this is not only unfounded, but perhaps completely untrue.

Lets start with some facts and figures.. . . . .

 

Yeah I use article marketing very heavily, and if there is such thing as a penalty towards the sites they link towards it has been far from hitting me.

 

Are you people saying submitting same content in 5 or 10 different sites does not adversely effect the site?

I thought its better to submit different articles in different 'submit article' site

 

Take a look at social media sites. The same article gets published dozens of times, and i've yet to see any negative impact on a site because of it.

 

I highly agree with this myth. If it where true then article marketing would be completely ineffective and nobody would use it.

You do not really get penalized for duplicate content. It just makes it harder to get any of it ranked. The first person to post it gets heavier credit then any of the other sites. So just make sure that you post the article a day or two before publishing it.

Not to mention you have to think of it this way. There has to be some % of the content / code that would have to be the same between each individual site. I am sure that very few sites have the same header, headlines, directories, menus, etc....

 

An interesting article indeed... thanks for sharing it. I've always gone with the flow and thought that dup content was a bad thing, but this clears the myth up a bit.

 

For a duplicate content penalty you have to copy the entire site structure as well. So just some duplicate articles won't be a big problem for any site. Especially when we're talking about established sites which in most cases rank even higher than the original source.

 

Well, there are two facets to this issue, and one is what you are referring to as a "myth".

1.) Submitting articles adversely affects your entire site by giving it a low quality score - false
2.) Submitting duplicate articles makes it very difficult for your website to be indexed for THAT ARTICLE - very true.

So if you look at it from the POV that your site itself is completely comprised of articles you submitted to directories, then your site will be very low on organic rankings, but if it is just one piece of your site, you should be fine.

Scott

 

Good distinction there, Scott. People tend to forget that individual pages and sites are handled (and penalized) differently.

And nice article - gave me some food for thought on how I approach building my sites.

 

Trouble is that not every site gets indexed within a day or two. The thing is that sometimes you can steal an article form a site that had that article on there for months and you would have found it by using a search engine - which guarantees that it's indexed and properly cached, however it is not unusual to over rank the original site with the same - word for word article. I've seen it in reality.

 

I'm going to follow up with an an article I wrote on that very question tomorrow. I've read quite a bit of research on how search engines determine which article came first, and it isn't handled how most people would think.

 

very interesting article thanks for sharing.

 

nice article thanks for sharing

 

While a lot of bigger companies have put the same or a version of the same articles concerning duplicate content, I just can't see it happening... Thanks for the article.

~ Rex ~
4 Sale SpoolMotorsports.com Network - Inquire Within

 

wow thats really bad. ffs

 

I have not seen a google slap either. I do change the title befor submitting but the content stays the same.

 

yes its better to submit different articles in different 'submit article' site

 

I had read it good article.......

 

Yeah there is no duplicate content Google penalty... what article comes higher in the SERPs though seems to be down to the authority of the website rather than which website originally ran the item...

 

Nothing could be further from the truth, it has absolutely nothing to with who posted it or got it indexed first.

Why do people keep saying this, it's never worked that way.