Article marketing is a great way to promote your sites: for every article you submit to an article directory, you typically get to place two or three links back to your own site(s), using anchor text of your choice. This results in link juice and referral traffic from the directory, and also any third party sites who pick up the article and republish it. However, many internet marketers are confused about the issue of duplicate content and what it means in practical terms for their submissions.
Basically, search engines are not too keen on returning listings with multiple copies of the same content, and not surprisingly, since this does not provide web searchers with a good user experience. So they tend to try and identify one copy of an article as the original, or preferred version, and devalue the rest in the listings. That doesn’t necessarily mean the other copies will not be listed at all, but just that they will appear lower down the rankings.
A common question that gets asked by article marketers is: is it OK to submit that same article to more than one directory? Personally I don’t see a problem with it – even if the versions that are identified as duplicates are suppressed in the search engine listings, there’s still a chance of getting referral traffic from the directories themselves, as well as any third-party reprints, and as long as they are not de-indexed completely by the search engines, you should still get the additional SEO benefits too.
Also, don’t forget that a large part of the article marketing strategy relies on your content being picked up and republished by website and ezine owners – so you’re going to have duplicate content “issues” anyway. And even if the worst happens and only one copy ends up in the search engine index, you haven’t lost anything. So there’s really no point in holding back – get your articles published as widely as possible to maximise the benefits that you may get from them!
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When you would like your site to be more visited – you must have perfect article and content – not duplicate bur your original.
Interesting post Rodney. I always learn a lot from your posts and really appreciate it! I wish you a Happy New Year. Regards, Martin
That’s a question that always bugged me because I read about how you should change your article slightly for each submission, but it’s so much easier to just copy/paste.
Agreed, duplicate content for links is fine, duplicate content to rank is not a good idea.
Thanks for the info Rodney. I am just getting started with articles and was wondering about posting duplicate articles. Perfect timing.
Roy Paeth
I think its ok to the main, quality directories. I have played with automation in this area and I believe the links will get discounted -You can submit to 5k of directories in one click!
When Matt Cutts (Google) was recently asked by a guy in a Q&A session how many backlinks were counted to his website, Mr Cutts looked at his screen and said 3. This was out of 1000+ showing in Yahoo Site Explorer.
Great info. I stumbled. People need to realize that the links you get from the article directories are not that powerful any more.
Agreed your points. But duplicating the content is good for traffic? The search engine may delete the site at anytime. But I must accept you as you might master the SEO.
It’s not bad if the content on your site is duplicate, as long as the first place it had appeared on the internet was on your site. Don’t worry about duplicate content as long as you have first content.
@Scooter – I wouldn’t use this to grab content for my own site, because I don’t believe it’ll be possible for the site to rank well. But you should still get the benefit of the multiplied backlinks, even if the pages don’t rank well.
I’ve been advised to change up the “description” and “title” when submitting my site link to directories for the very reasons you are mentioning. This is good advice for everyone to just change up your articles a bit before submitting them. Use lots of good keywords for your site.