freearticlesforsites.com

The Truth About Duplicate Content

When I first began this site, I originally thought of setting up a simple portfolio. I wanted potential clients to have a place to go to so they could immediately view my outstanding writing skills and start paying me buckets of cash to write for their sites. The buckets that are coming in are unfortunately smaller than tea cups but that’s a story for another post.

I thought having a plain copyrighted portfolio would be an awful waste of great stuff. I decided to monetize my articles with advertising and offer them for free to anyone who would want to reprint them. At the back of my mind though, I was thinking: Why would anyone want to get stuck with duplicate content? Isn’t there some cryptic, only-techies-can-understand rule from Google on high that roughly translates to: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s content? Then again, aren’t there hundreds of article directories peddling free content and encouraging syndication? Why are they still around if duplicate content is so evil?

I may not be an SEO god but I am a good researcher and I recently found some answers to the mysterious part of virtual life that is duplicate content. Here’s what I found out while sitting under the tree of enlightenment and getting pummeled by a thousand enlightening apples.

#1- There are two types of duplicate content.

The first type of duplicate content can arise if there is content in your site that appears more than once within your site. The second type is duplicate content across different domains. The second type is obviously my main concern.

At first I had this notion that duplicate content across domains would mean punishment for all the clones involved. Apparently though, Google says that duplicate content penalty is a myth. What Google really does is group together all duplicate content and choose one that it thinks is the original. The other duplicates get filtered out.

#2- You will only get sent to the depths of Inferno if you duplicate maliciously or add no value to duplicate content.

Google only wags a disapproving finger at sites that have 100% duplicate content. These are sites that do not add any new value to scraped content. In other words, if all your articles are copied from other sites, your site will get nowhere and will probably languish in virtual hell.

#3- You can add value to duplicate content.

If duplicate content gets filtered out, wouldn’t printing them be bad for you since your version may not end up in search engine results? Not necessarily.

As a blogger or website owner, it is always best to put readers and not search bots in mind when building content. You would want your readers to keep coming back to your site because they genuinely find useful, original and interesting information. This does not mean though that you absolutely cannot use duplicate content. You can take advantage of duplicate content by making sure that you add value to it. Adding value simply means making sure that most of your site contains original content.

Reprinted articles that have originals published somewhere else can simply be treated as guest posts. If you find valuable free reprint information that you would like to use on your site, you can simply tell your readers that you found an article from (site name or URL here) that they may find interesting. A better way of citing an article source is to indicate the original author’s real name. This will give your readers the impression that you have information from some other authority on the topic in question.

The truth is that the debate over duplicate content is far from over. As search engine technology evolves everyday, there is no telling how this issue will be treated in the future. Obviously though, as of this writing, duplicate content across domains does not seem half as bad as it used to.

Highlight and copy the article title and body and paste them on your website. By doing so, you also agree to hyperlink to http://freearticlesforsites.com from your site. You may use an appropriate anchor text or the complete URL of this site. The link should be placed directly after the article title or after the article body.