Articles, Duplicate Content - Myths & Facts…Here We Go Again
Article Marketing, Google, Internet Marketing, Webmaster/Website Optimization Do-Follow CommentsBy, JR
Yes, another article about duplicate content, I know, you guys may want to strangle me right now, but there is so much hype and misconception out there about duplicate content and the duplicate content Google slap that I just had to go there and since Google blogged about it last week, I figured now is the perfect time!
Over and over duplicate content is mistaken and distorted into something it isn’t. Some of the biggest myths are about article marketing and duplicate content. One of the biggest article marketing secrets seems to be the truth about duplicate content and article marketing because the BS just keeps propagating on the web.
ARTICLES AND DUPLICATE CONTENT - FACT AND MYTH
MYTH: You have to use some article spinner software, to change your articles around or you will get slapped by Google for submitting the same article to different article sites.
FACT: Totally UNTRUE and doesn’t even make sense. I can and do all the time, submit the same article to thousands of sites with Article Marketer and they always show up in search results for the keywords, some rank higher than others, depending on the article site, but they will all be there.
MYTH: Google will slap you for submitting the same article to different article sites.
FACT: Umm, okay how would they do this? In reality, logistically there is no way that Google can penalize the author even if they wanted to, which they don’t.
If, in reality, Google penalized for duplicate articles the logic would follow that G would have to penalize the article sites for publishing the duplicates and that would mean that there would be no article sites left since they often feature the same article submitted by the same author that is also published on other sites.
And, then would it also follow that if same articles were considered duplicate content, the millions of sites that syndicate and disburse articles and news feeds, such as that from the Associated Press, would have been banned long ago.
FACT: Duplicate Content has nothing to do with the submitting the same article. Duplicate content refers to the significantly noticeable duplicated content within the SAME domain or across multiple domains.
THE REAL MEANING OF DUPLICATE CONTENT
Really there are two forms of duplicate content, the malicious and non malicious types.
Non-Malicious Duplicate Content
Same exact content repeated across the same domain, usually because of the CMS design and without malicious intent by the webmaster.
1. Same content across the same domain, such as such as two versions of the same page, for example, a readable and print version on a website.
2. Blogs - By design blogs and CMS apps generate duplicate content, such as the same content falling under archives, tags and new posts listed on the home page.
Both of the above can be handled by indicating on your robots.txt file to block the search engine from crawling and indexing those pages.
Example of Robots.txt commands:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /print page/
Learn more ways to address such non malicious duplicate content on your sites at GWT on Fixing Duplicate Content Issues.
“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”
-Google Webmaster Tools
Malicious Duplicate Content - The Real Penalty
Malicious duplicate content is the true culprit and WILL suffer a duplicate content penalty and basically applies to: Substantially same content placed on multiple pages, subdomains, or multiple domains to deliberately manipulate the search engine rankings, and get more traffic.
Last week Google posted a very comprehensive post about duplicate content on their Webmaster Central Blog that will hopefully crush the myths forever and end the constant barage of hype that exists about duplicate content, read it at: Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty
What do you guys think? Sick of duplicate content yet?
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September 15th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Google is quite good at accurately filtering out duplicate content on the same domain. For example, they’re much more likely to give you main article the position in search rather than the same post on a category or tag page. They don’t penalize you for this although by not allowing these pages to be spidered you can make the ‘bot’s job easier and more accurate.
For off-site duplication, it’s going to depend on the authority of the site, the age of the domain, pagerank, publish time vs. spider frequency and a number of other ‘mystery’ factors. Google doesn’t always get this right and may not even filter full or partial duplicates in some cases.
For example, somebody copied one of my OpTempo product reviews in full and pasted it into a long established PR7 forum. Boom! My original article is buried and the forum post takes it’s place. A quick edit and a few comments and dofollow links, and I’m back on page one along with the forum copy of the original.
Another example, I have a niche blog where I only post articles from article sites (yes, with the resource box) and PLR articles. Most of these articles, which are duplicate content, do well in search. Why? Because it’s a pre-owned domain that that dates back to 1997 and it has a PR4.
September 15th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
I agree that enginges like wordpress provide too much ways to show same articles.
I use this robots txt (self-made so may not be perfect)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /20
Disallow: */trackback/
Slightly offtopic. JR, do you have experience about Google penalties? I really could use good guide on that, most info is “don’t do paid posts blah-blah-blah”.
Rarsts last blog post..If browsers were umbrellas
JR reply on September 15th, 2008 5:29 pm:
@ Rarst
Email me and we can talk more about Google Penalties: blogmaster@getinternetmarketingstrategies.com
September 15th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Thanks JR, onme of the best articles so far on this subject.
As for my blogs, a couple tick boxes in my All In One SEO plugin, and I think it works fine.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Grab Your Offline Marketing Tools Here Too!
Dennis Edell reply on September 15th, 2008 7:53 pm:
*One of the best articles - sorry
Dennis Edells last blog post..Grab Your Offline Marketing Tools Here Too!
JR reply on September 15th, 2008 8:50 pm:
Hi Dennis,
Yes you are right, the All In One SEO plug in checkboxes will deindex and archives and tags, that is one of the best WP plug ins ever made.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Indeed it is. it seemed like the whole ‘net was freakin out when the original developer stopped….right up until someone else pickled it up
Do you think that’s all I really need. Other things like robot.txy and so forth just confuse me to no end.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Grab Your Offline Marketing Tools Here Too!
JR reply on September 16th, 2008 2:17 am:
Well, I have both, the settings on SEO and robots.txt for the this blog. The robots is because you don’t want the SE’s crawling and indexing your themes, admin areas and such, for security reasons and to use the crawl only for important pages, and not waste it’s juice on pages you don’t need indexed.
Here is my robots.txt, and also the previous commenter, Rarst’s is good too:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /cont/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /about/
Disallow: /contact me/
Disallow: /tags/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /contact-form/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /*.avi$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Now, for websites, other than WP, that do not use plug-ins you always want to have a robots file, with the appropriate commands, for same reasons I listed.
JR reply on September 16th, 2008 2:19 am:
BTW, I too created this myself, I know it’s confusing, but I actually got tips from a tech blog, and I got the layout from him, since I am no expert in this matter, I just copied his.
Dennis Edell reply on September 16th, 2008 7:00 am:
So I can copy what you have there?
OK, so i copy that, save it as a .txt file and upload to my server…but to where?
I didn’t know it could even read .txt files.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Grab Your Offline Marketing Tools Here Too!
JR reply on September 16th, 2008 12:47 pm:
Dennis,
Oh yes it can read text files. Copy it to a text file and save it as robots.txt and then upload it to the root directory of your blog from the cpanel of your hosting, you can make sure by checking with your host. If you are using Hostgator, it is definitely the root folder, which is the main folder where all your blog files sit.
JR reply on September 16th, 2008 12:49 pm:
sorry, I cut off one command, add that one too: Disallow: /category/
September 16th, 2008 at 11:59 am
So true JR, there are a lot of misconceptions about duplicate content and people tend to make it too much of a big deal. Duplicate content will only affect domains copying your content, it won’t affect your own domain as you are the legitimate author. I also noticed that Big G isn’t that afraid of duplicate content, you can build some nice traffic even with duplicate!
SEO Horrors last blog post..New template…
JR reply on September 17th, 2008 1:33 am:
Hi Ben,
So many people are soooooooo afraid of dupe content, and in reality, unless you are doing deliberate dirt, there is no reason to be scared and you are right G isn’t.
September 16th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Hey thanks JR, I really appreciate it. I do use HG and know about uploads, it’s just that NOW I find out WHERE to upload FIRST. LOL
More then once I’ve uploaded to the wrong directory and spent hours if not days pouring over it.
After placement, is there a way for me to see if its working? If I did it right?
Dennis Edells last blog post..Grab Your Offline Marketing Tools Here Too!
JR reply on September 17th, 2008 1:32 am:
Dennis,
Yeah I know about f’u-ing up the upload..lol.
If you have only the blog domain in your hosting then just put into the folder called “public html”, if the blog is an add on domain, then upload it to that domain’s main folder (where all the other sub folders and files are for that add on, so one click on the add on and you are there), whatever name you had assigned to it, this should be error free. If you are really worried, just open chat with HostGator, they are great and they will upload it for you in five minutes.
Then wait a couple of days, go to G Webmaster Tools and click on Tools from your dashboard, and then click on Analyze robots.txt, there G will tell you if there are any probs with the robots file, or if it’s fine they will show “success” and you can verify there that they actually saw it in the crawl, then you’re all good!
You’re welcome!
Dennis Edell reply on September 17th, 2008 8:55 am:
Thanks again!
Dennis Edells last blog post..Grab Your Offline Marketing Tools Here Too!
September 17th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
JR, this is a great topic that needs to be shown off! Many many people are scared to death about duplicated content!
I also use the All In One SEO and let it deal with those issues!
Work At Home Mom Taras last blog post..Would morals get the in way of money?
September 20th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Great article about duplicate content!
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:51 am
Thanks for this clarification.
Previously, I Googled for hours to find and answer to this question, with no luck.
There are heaps forum threads on this subject. It’s interesting that many of the posters are pushing this line that submitting the same article to many directories is a risk.
But as you point out, if that were true, then the article directories themselves would be getting no traffic, since they are full of “dupe content”. And it would defeat the whole purpose of writing and submitting an article to even one directory, because the whole point of doing that is so that it might get picked up by publishers and be replicated elsewhere!
JR reply on September 22nd, 2008 4:00 pm:
@ Australian
That is exactly right and yes the forums are the worst for this kind of inaccurate information, I too see it over and over again and it’s just total BS. Somethings are just common sense and testing for yourself, I can google any one of my articles and they are all there, 50+ times over and over, from many different directories.
I’m glad this post helped you and welcome to the blog!
September 26th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Thanks for the welcome.
Re forums: they can be great sources of info. But they can be terrible also. There are lots of people who think they know more than they do. And there are some people who probably know the truth but just want to misinform others for the hell of it.
This happens right across the internet. There are so many people with axes to grind, hidden agendas (and hidden identities!). So it’s best to be skeptical, take your time, and don’t just believe the first thing you read.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Sorry, but I can’t agree. If you submit the same article to hundreds of directories, Google may not necessarily penalize you, but it will filter out all the duplicate articles. Have you ever submitted an article (the same article), check the links in two weeks’ time and then check them again in 6 months’ time? Yes, many of them will have disappeared completely (and they can still be found via the article directory category by the bots). Even more surprisingly, those who will have stuck will be the ones you submitted to websites with different article MS. You know why? Because they have different html codes. You will notice that only one or two articles submitted to Article Dashboard websites will have stuck. And we all know that the automated article submitters have as a majority of their directories the Article Dashboard CMS. What I do is spin the article and submit different variations of it to each directory. It is amazing what a single different word in your article title can do for the indexing of your articles. I have had much more success with my strategy.
JR reply on October 5th, 2008 3:33 am:
@ Cata
In the long time that I have been submitting articles I have never seen a drop off, I can Google the oldest article title and they are all there in search results, every time.
Cata reply on October 6th, 2008 8:33 am:
Whatever… It’s funny however, if you look at your Yahoo backlinks, there’s only 3 or 4 coming from your submitted articles, in the first 1000. Talk about lack of efficiency.
JR reply on October 6th, 2008 3:45 pm:
@ Cata
Not sure where you learned to count but there are at least 20 showing up in first 1000, not that that matters anyway, the total links is what matter, not what shows up first.
You can keep doing it your way, but the main point is that submitting the same article to 1,000 directories does nothing but build tons of quality backlinks, from the directories as well as from all the republished links.
Here is a great example, since my articles are new and you may say that they haven’t had time to “fall off” yet, so here is one written in 2005 and can be found on http://www.articletrader.com/computers/page105.html — “Shorten Your Blogging-RSS Learning and Submission Curve”— when googled in quotes it shows up 819 times, when Yahoo’d it shows up 7,490 times, the same article from different directories AND includes all the times the article was republished by other sites. Go ahead and pick any article from that page, or any other article from any other article site, and you will get the same results.
There are over 6,000 backlinks coming to this blog in Yahoo, many of them from articles and all from 2 months of work. I can google any of my articles and basically any article from any author and they will all show up many many times in SERPS.
This blog went from PR0 to PR 3 in two months, so the results speak for themselves.
October 4th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
@ JR ~ Thanks for the great post! I agree there is a lot of misinformation on some of the forums I visit. I agree that submitting articles does not constitute duplicate content … the directories would not have such high page rank. I do like to put my articles on my sites first … then change slightly and submit.
@ Cata ~ I haven’t been submitting long enough to see if there is a drop off over time.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:06 am
I just found your site, and I’m reading lots of great stuff. Although I haven’t read all your article on duplicate content, I totally agree with you here. One thing I do is just to make sure I write a different article that I might post on my website than what I post to the 1000’s of Article Sites out there. It’s usually pretty much the same content, but rewritten specifically for my site. What I post to the Article Sites is usually pretty good content, but what I’m going for really is the backlink.
JR reply on October 20th, 2008 1:50 am:
Hello,
Welcome, your method is totally correct and optimal!
November 10th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Thanks for this informative article.
There’s so much fear-mongering on this, it’s hard to separate the good information from the bad. I have to agree that there’s little to worry about with duplicate articles. So much of the information out there deals with duplicate content within a site and automatically projects that concern onto duplicate content across sites. Of course your site will be penalized if you have multiple domains with substantially identical content. Submitting to article directories doesn’t fall into this category.
I also agree that the backlinks generated through syndication is a goldmine.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:29 am
Really good post. Seems strange that there is so much misinformation regarding duplicate content out there.
Ben
December 5th, 2008 at 10:25 am
JR,
Thanks for another great post. I am going back through all your old posts and they are amazing. I have not done a lot with article marketing because I didn’t understand that duplicate content rule. Thanks for clearing that up.
Andy@christianonlinebusinesss last blog post..Christian Business Opportunities Online Scam
December 20th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
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