The duplicate content penalty – I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about it like it is some sort of disease and in a way it could be, but you really shouldn’t lose sleep over it because there really is no dupicate content penalty (even the powers that be from Google have verified this) – there might be some sort of filter but if you get enough links to your articles they will all be shown in the search engines.
What Is Duplicate Content?
Simply put, it just means that if you submit the same exact article to different websites (including your own) the SE’s will not show all of them in their search results. That’s all. It doesn’t mean your site will get penalized or that Google will ban you (well, at least not currently anyway).
Having said that, I can also verify that I have personally submitted the same article to many different places and had those articles ranking on page 1 of google all at the same time. Not only that, but if you go over to the warrior forum, and search for duplicate content, you can find threads where others have tested this and also proven that you can get duplicate articles to rank.
But, you never know what the SE’s will do in the future and if you want to give yourself a bit of an edge, submitting different articles to the article directories can be a good idea. And, of course you ALWAYS want to have the article on your site be totally different from the ones you are submitting.
So what makes an article “different”?
There are varying theories as to how much “different” and article needs to be in order to be considered “different” by the Search Engines. No one really knows because the SE’s don’t make their algorithms for figuring these things out public.
If you want to really be on the safe side, you would totally rewrite the entire thing, but many people feel that rewriting 60% or more of the article is sufficient.
It’s not that difficult but can be tedious. What I do is rewrite the sentences several times and the recompile them into different articles. I actually use a text manipulator or content spinner to do this, but don’t worry about that right now – I will make future posts on this topic.
So, you can either rewrite your article or submit the same one but no matter which of these that you do, you’ll want to be sure to vary the anchor text that you use as a link back to your site. Use different variations of your keywords (more on keywords in a later “lesson”), so if your article was targeting the keyword dog food, you might use “dog food”, “healthy dog food” and “best dog food” in your anchor text.
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