There is no duplicate content penalty - Note to Article marketers

Have to disagree 100%.

Otherwise, if a duplicate article is on 100 sites, it would grab all of Google's top 100 spots.

But that doesn't happen. Google tries to not show duplicate versions in its top results.

Whether you call it a penalty. Or showing a variety of results. Or whatever. The fact is, duplicate content is effectively penalized in the search results.

Unless you're gaming the results with a manufactured search, such as searching for an exact phrase from an article in quotes, thereby forcing Google to show duplicate results if Google wants to display more than one result, your duplicate content is simply going to not be shown, or buried so deep it doesn't matter.

Well, its sort of a myth. While there is NO penalty for syndicated content there are issues.

SE's, mainly Google, work hard thru their algorithms to bring unique content to a person in their search. In order to do this, they need to filter some out. So what they do instead of "showing them all" is have the spiders sort them by date <as best as they can> and display the syndicated content with the oldest date.

One way around this is promoting your site with the syndicated content to get a higher page rank and of course more quality back links.

Getting into what "duplicate" and "syndicated" content are could be the subject of a huge debate. The above is simply a synopsis.

Gary

Article marketers should link back to orginal articles as Google says.

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I read somewhere on the google forum that duplicate content on the same site is a problem and that is a no no whereas the same content on another site as far as google is concerned don't matter a it will not index all the articles just one and don't want to show 100's of the same article to it's viewers. That make sense.

That is why it is always best to that if you have a original article to first submit it to you own site, wait for it to be indexed (or help the process) and then only submit it to article directories. (take note article directories as ezine is not the only article directory as some people think)

Also when you add your own article to your site the first time make sure your name is there as the author or your company name as that way at least if some jerk steal it it will be prove

Does this make me a article professor - yes no not sure

No it don't but I kinda think it is common sense

Honestly, what do warriors actually understand on this forum? They are so scared of everything, that it's inhibiting their learning & marketing process!

Why is it everytime this subject comes up someone automatically think "steal someone elses articles" .... I do not think anyone mentioned here about stealing others content.

Syndication and Re-Publishing is not stealing someone elses content..

Syndication is very effective!

James

Not correct.

You can see the same article indexed at least 10 times, identical, word count exact , verbiage exact.

It's way more than 1 and the number indexed and displayed in the SERPS before it hits the supplemental always varies but it's WAAY more than 1.

That would be absurd and remove all choice from the surfer, something Google doesn't want at all.

No it will not be ignored .. That is false. What do you think "Syndication" is ???

James

Agreed. This is something that's argued on this board and IM boards all over the internet, and it's barely worth considering. Remember folks, the engineers at Google are some of the best in the world, and the algorithm is a constantly evolving intelligent method that knows the difference between your article on multiple sites and doorway pages.

The duplicate content penalty is designed for people who create massive doorway pages on their site, or create a site and point 100 domains at it. If you're not doing either of those things, you don't have a lot to worry about.

I submit the same article to hundreds of sites all over the net without any worries. My SERPs generally stay very stable, so if I was getting penalized, I would have known it by now. Don't worry so much about duplicate content and start focusing on making said content better.

Yeah listen to the Man, you do not want his flying monkey to pay you a visit..

James

You are getting backlinks and PR to your site because of these duplicate content. Though Google don't show them in SERPs, still they will be counted as backlinks.

And one other thing. You will get traffic from these articles on multiple sites. Don't just count on the pages that are shown in SERPs ... People going to web sites with your articles sure spill over to your site.

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Depending on the contextual relevance of the page/site, along with other SEO factors and the actual query, they may see it.

Now try a less refined search:

profiting keyword supply - ????????? Google

8 of the first ten listings are for your article. Article City bumped WebProNews for second place.

In your case Brian, your query is precise enough that Google is comfortable with the relevance of the two instances of the article returned in the results so it can offer more of a mix of other contextually relevant possibilities.

This is the real advantage of syndicating content all over the net - it increases the probability of your content, when considered in the context of other content on a given site (and that given site's overall ranking) is going to appear in the first couple of pages of results.

Thanks to LSI and NLP, chances are even higher that your article may come up in results for keywords you never even used, simply because some site picking up your content increases its overall relevance to a given query.

My shortening of your original query made Google "Less Certain" of the relevance so it returned a broader group of sites containing your content.

As a sidebar to this (no legal pun intended), it's what makes article spinning so attractive. The underlying context remains the same while allowing the author to target a far more robust set of keywords.

Syndicating content also provides another doorway for direct traffic from those sites picking up your content. While it's admittedly low in most cases, the aggregate potential is huge.

You're assuming that the only criteria Google is using to filter the SERPs is the content of your article. There are many, many factors involved, most of which you have no control over, like the overall quality of the site that hosts your article, the age of the domain, whether the site is relevant to the search, etc. Irrelevant, low-quality, spammy sites aren't going to show up on the first page of the results just because they reprinted your article.

Lawyers are the only people I've ever heard saying "ergo".

Meant purely in jest, please don't send any flying monkeys my way. I have a hard enough time keeping my house clean.

That's the point "most " do not get "indexed".

Or "most" do get indexed

Both statements can hold true because this is one of those conversations where clarrification of details is king, because a blanket statement doesn't give a clear picture based on various variables.

You have to define what "most" means as people have very different methods of going about getting their content out and the volume is everything in this discussion.

If you're just pumping out 10-20 copies of your article or so, then yeah agreed most , if not all will be indexed, and you'll get perfectly decent backlinks from the lot - no issue, you're statement above holds true, no penalty of any kind.

If you're pumping out 100 copies of the exact same content or even 500 or 1000 or more which some people do.

MOST will NOT get "indexed" or rather most will be in the supplemental, this is so simple to prove, anybody can test the point themselves in under a day.

Slam out the exact same content - you'll get 10-20 or so in the index, the rest Google dumps into the supplemental and anything in the supplemental has from my experience an almost non existent link juice benefit.

For reference it doesn't matter whether you drip feed the unique content or just bash it out, Google doesn't take mercy on you for slowly distributing the exact same content 400 times.

In addition the semantics around the word "penalty" cause confusion to newbies.

If penalty means you suffer a decrease in rankings, then there's no penalty whether you submit 5 copies or 5000 copies.

This has to be true, logic and experience dictate it, otherwise as we know, every major news site on the planet would be being penalized to hell and back. This is myth number one which really should be toast by now.

If penalty means your duplicate content all hits the supplemental and therefore has less link juice than links from within original content then yes it's a penalty.

Again, it's not rocket science to see. You'll see your site has virtually no gain from 1000 identical content backlinks , literally none bar what you would expect from the 20 or so that sit in the first index. People often think it has impact because they see a rise, not actually realizing that just submitting it to 20 or 30 sites would have had the same impact.

But spin that content/ have unique content and throw 1000 links back to your site from it and, you can go from obscurity to page 1 in a few days.

It's a myth that just wanging 1000 copies of the same content out via distribution methods will get you quality link juice.

Think about it logically , can you imagine how easy it would be to game the SERPS if this was true. Why not just send out the same article to 10,000 sitesor 50,000 sites hey we can all be CNN or number one for every term we want overnight presuming the on site elements are in place.

You only need to talk to any professional SEO company, as to what they feel the value of identical content is as it relates to back link juice.

So yeah, there's a "penalty" but it entirely depends on volume and application but more importantly it's not the penalty that some folks seem to think it is, ie a decrease in rankings, it's simply that you don't get link juice love or at least it's massively diluted when all your content lives in the supplemental.

If Google doesn't think it's even good enough to bother showing it's audience , why on earth would anybody think Google is going to bother passing on it's trust from it to the money site.

I'm not sure which is becoming the bigger myth, that dupe content penalty myth or that dupe content has the same link juice myth.

You need to do two things, one understand Zeus is right, James is right, most contributors to the thread are right , but it depends on context and application.

Secondly, this actually isn't hard stuff to test after a while. Spend a few months playing with various approaches, when you're living depends on rankings, you'll find out pretty quickly why every professional SEO company on the planet that concentrates on backlinks, ensures that the backlinks do not come from dupe content and that they are varied in type .

By all means send your article out to 1 bazillion websites, bottom line Syndication is GOOD. You're content is on sites people will find via internal search mechanisms as opposed to Googles, you're getting eyeballs onto your material - win.

But if you think those 1000 sites with your article on all sat in the supplemental are all giving you the same quality link juice as 1000 different articles, then you're in for a nasty shock.

Google's simply not that daft.

Folks just need to seperate the benefits of syndication for backlinking and syndication for simply getting your content out there for more eyeballs to see.

Thanks guys i am bit clear about duplicate content now... this post is quite useful

A neat litte trick to ALWAYS get duplicate content to show up in SERPs is to use hexidecimal encoding for the content. Don't ask me why but it works for now.