How to Avoid the Duplicate Content Penalty with your Article Submission

Although article submission is an important part of the advertising strategy of mnay people, they appear to have a total misconception of Google’s duplicate content penalty,as it is wrongly referred to.So why ‘Google’ particularly? Because Google is the most used search engine, and more searches are carried out using Google than any other. Many use Yahoo for other purposes, such as for their email services, but when it comes to searching for information Google beats all the rest hands down, and that is reflected in the number of people that use it. However, there is also that much misunderstood duplicate content penalty that article submission can involve. Or so most believe!

When you want a web page listed on a search engine – any search engine – always write with Google in mind, but also naturally with the reader in mind, and you will achieve what you are seeking to achieve. Part of achieving that involves being aware of the requirements of specifc Google algorithms, such as its latent sematic indexing (LSI) algorithm, and the PageRank calculation based upon the quantity and quality of other web pages linked to yours, and structuring your article to conform to them – not page rank).

Even with all of that, however, article submission to a number of ezines and article directories is essential if you are to maximize the probability of your article being listed on Page #1 of Google for the keyword it is optimized on. This surprises many people – the fact that an article can be listed, let alone listed highly. It is commonly believed that the principal reason for article submission is to receive back-links from the directories and ezines, and also to have them read where they are published.

It is true that these are worthwhile benefits, although far more valuable is having your article listed in Google’s search engine results pages along with the link to a page on your website you have provided in your Author’s Resource. Your article is published on its own page by each directory, and that can be listed in the same way as any other web page can be. because article directories can achieve many more links directed to your published article, you are likely to achieve a higher listing on a directory page than on a page on your website, unless you are an expert at SEO of course.

Where the potential duplicate content penalty comes in is when you submit your article to more than one article directory. These are considered duplicates so your article will be penalized, right? Wrong! What most don’t know is that there is no penalty imposed by Google for duplicate content, and here is what actually does happen.

Google considers its customers to be those seeking information by using its search engine. They aren’t people like you and I that use the search engine for advertising, or even those that pay for Google Adwords PPC advertising, but are people using Google to find information using specific search terms or ‘keywords’. Google want to provide as good a service as possible to its customers, and to offer numbers of web pages containing exactly the same content is failing to achieve that.

Ultimately, Google will leave only one listed page containing any specific content. However, it takes time to achieve that. The initial result could be that several listings of the same article could be acquired, getting there by virtue of the SEO applied both by you in your article and by the directory. Over a period of time your listings will gradually be dropped until you have only one listing of of a web page containing each article, with a consequent reduction in the PageRank provided to your listed Resource web page. This takes some time to take place, however.

You can do as I do and submit your article to over 400 different article directories and ezines and have them published in them all. Each publication will not only give you good PageRank points, but is also liable to be listed on Google before duplication leads to them slowly being removed. Through time they will drop off Google’s listings and your PageRank will fall.

I offset that by using an article submission strategy involving writing and submitting a totally new article every week or two using a distribution service. That compensates for any pages dropped from the listings and also gets you a net PageRank gain because you are publishing new articles faster than Google is dropping them. In fact, you can use two different strategies.

a) You can write a different version of the article each time, using the same keywords and Resource URL, so that you maintain and even improve your listing for that keyword and your URL listing in Google, or

b) You can write a new article using different keywords but the same URL, and hopefully get Google listings for a variety of keywords while maintaining and even improving your PageRank for you web page.

Each has its advantages: strategy a) offers you the chance to obtain multiple listings of the same article for the same keyword, maximizing the likelihood of a searcher clicking to your article, while b) enables you to achieve one listing on each of several different results pages, thus exposing your article once to a number of different searches or keywords. I do both!

One of the implications of this way of looking at duplicate content is that your blog postings can be copied and submitted to article directories, although they are best to be written to a minimum of 500 words to be sure of publication in most dirctories. This is an article submission technique used by many people, and while, yes, it is duplicate content, it will take a few weeks for the so-called ‘penalty’ to take effect. Irrespective of what others might tell you, you will not be banned from any directory or search engine for doing this: it is common practice.