Duplicate Content - Dispel the myth!

There seems to be a lot of confusion over duplicate content and in particular; how / why a site is penalised for it.

If we take article marketing as an example: My experience is that writing original articles and submitting them to article directories can generate a lot of backlinks. However, some suggest that because the article is duplicated on many websites it somehow negates the value of the backlink. Some even suggest it could have a negative effect - is this true? Or is the duplicate content 'penalty' only applied to the hosting site?

I really would like to understand the duplicate content penalty properly, so any thoughts / comments / suggestions that will help the cause are very welcome.

T

 

From what i can understand, you won't get a penalty from google, but I think whoever has the article first will get index, rest wont be.

anyone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Duplicate content may indeed be devalued...

It is written:

 

I would think that many of those duplicate pages on multiple article directory sites would go to supplemental results. Not sure how much value comes from a link on a page sitting in Google's supplemental index.

But many people swear by it for gaining back links. Yahoo and MSN likely recognizes all these links individually. Google may, or may not, be discounting them to some degree.

 

I've done a lot of article marketing and have not seen any negative effect from having my articles posted on multiple sites. A lot of poeple are writing articles just to get backlinks rather than to provide unique helpful information nowadays.

 

Just make sure that if you've published the article first that it's indexed in Google before you submit it to article directories

 

Amsterdam ... the concept of content duplication penalties has been debated time and time again - with no one really coming to a true concensus as to the actual consequences. I personally believe there are issues with duplicate content, however I am not sure on its impact or severity from SEO perspective and only Google (and other engines) would know.

Many also have duplicate penalty concerns over descriptions provided in directory submissions, as well as RSS-to-html of RSS feeds and other similar content distribution techniques.

What I do know is that:

1. Google and the other engines do look for backlinks ... so take the backlink.
2. Lets not always worry about the engines, some of these article and directory sites have huge memberships and traffic - find the good ones, keep submitting to them and you will see traffic.

Good Luck

 

the issues with duplicate content are only when your site is not trusted, trusted sites have no problems with duplicate and by trusted site I understand an old site with strong backlinks, etc

 

I wrote an article about Duplicate Content and vBulletin Forums a few months ago. The article is skewed toward vBulletin forums, but the core concepts apply..

.

 

My take on this has and will always be that duplicate content will be treated as duplicate and will be ignored by at least Google. Having said that, getting ignored on search results page is already equivalent to a penalty.

 

Personally I don't think you understand the issues at hand here and your comment is not accurate.

For those following this discussion, I'm going to try to give a live example of what we are talking about in hopes that we can all get a little better understanding as to what is really happening.

Back in Feb/March of this year (2006) I wrote an article called, "Helpful Strategies for Selling Leather and Leather Products Online!" It is a 4 part article and I have only submitted the first 2 parts to article sites.

Okay so lets see what google thinks of my articles:

A quick search on google for "Helpful Strategies for Selling Leather" brings back Results 1 - 10 of about 1,050 .

If you browse through the results and past the first few pages, you will see that some of the results are in "supplemental" but there are still many of them that are not. Anything in supplemental is on Google's secondary index which is a fall-back index (where suspicious content goes ) just incase it can't find what you are looking for the primary index.

Of interest, in my query for my article, is the mixing of the supplemental and non supplemental pages together from page 2 or 3 on. What exactly does that mean? Are all my articles on all the different sites doomed to the supplemental index? MAYBE ... I'm not quite sure, but the bottom line is i have 1000 or so links coming to my site and the links do generate some traffic, not too much but definitely some.

Like I said in my earlier post, take the link and keep going.

 

it's important to be indexed first by the google about duplicate content subject

 

Dont worry about duplicate content, just make sure you outrank the other pages

 

Yes something to consider and given that I had my articles on my site for more than a year before I submitted them to the article sites and my site doesn't even rank for that article make you think about the accuracy of that statement (btw I believe in that). ANDDDD YES, that is totally original content written by me ...

 

I was under the impression that the first person to get indexed with a particular article was safe, and all others would get a dupe content penalty. The problem is, a friend of mine had his articles indexed first then a few weeks later a site hosted in the Netherlands cropped up which had basically copied his whole website, and my friend got de-indexed, not the copycat. Has anybody else experienced this?

 

Many thanks to everybody who has replied and especially LaCabra for some very pertinent information there.

I have come to the conclusion that the so called duplicate content penalty is very much a woolly issue as nobody seems to have any definite answers. Nevertheless it appears that article marketing is still a worthwhile exercise for promoting a site - so I will continue to do so.

T

 

Amsterdam, article marketing is worthwhile to promote your website but don't make the mistake of submitting your on-site content to places which will syndicate it. Make sure your on-site content is unique and any marketing you do is done with different articles which are not on your website.

 

I am glad some of you are trying to help but alot of you are saying 'i think'. That can be bad as you obviously don't know. Again not trying to hurt anyones feelings just like to keep things accurate.

Wrong.

Google is basically the only one who has a good enough algo to do anything about this. If you submit an article to one site(sometimes it gets picked up by others and you can't control that) you will get good value however if it submitted to thousands of sites one is the one considered original and all the rest are duplicate content. These can still be indexed and still give value however very low.

You won't be penalized but it isn't effective to do this either. This works for MSN and Yahoo! still.

 

If you have a concern about this and your serious about using article marketing as a method of promo then I'd reccommend spinning a few different articles out of one on your site.

i.e. rewrite the first couple of paragraphs, then the next two and the final one mix them in with a few versions of the title and then submit each version to a handful of article directories. Of course there are numerous combos here so you can play around with it if you write each version correctly.

I've found that after submitting the same article to many (100-200) article directories a lot of the results go to supplemental and as someone else mentioned it appears that my article isn't giving me the same value for that backlink from everywhere once it's found in so many places.

 

Personally, I no longer submit to article directory sites. We found much better results writing quality articles and publishing them exclusively on our own network. I don't know why anyone would spend hours writing a really good article only to give it away to MSA sites and other re-publishers. Good articles generate natural links. I myself have linked out to a lot of useful and relevant sites/articles and I'm sure so have a lot of other people. Forget article directories. I doubt anyone knows for sure Google's take on duplicated content and the penalty, if any. Certainly they don't want their index filled with duplicated articles. Why take the chance?