The Great Duplicate Content Issue

You might have seen on the web that there are many people who sell content in many forms. What I am talking about today are articles. Content is essential to any website in order for it to look good for the search engines. Not everyone is a good writer and if you look around you can buy articles from anywhere between $5 and $20 for a 500 word article. But what is stopping these authors from selling the article again, or even using it themselves first? Why is this even an issue? Well, Google has something called a duplicate content filter where the big G ‘penalises’ websites for using the same content more than once.

Why a duplicate content filter?

Unfortunately there are many people who will steal other peoples content and use it for their own good. This type of manipulative or deceptive content reproduction is frowned upon by search engines. So they have come up with a way to combat this, namely, a duplicate content filter.

But hold on, its not quite as strict as it seems.

This is quite a grey area in the webmaster world. Remember, I used the words manipulative and deceptive before. If you have your own content and you wish to use it more than once, i.e use it on your website and submit it to article directories, in my experience, is fine. You might recieve a small penalty, but nothing too crazy.

Some duplicate content workarounds.

Rewrite your articles. Plain and simple. Make a few copies of your articles and avoid the penalty all together. The only problem here is that not everyone is a great writer.

Submit a shorter copy of the article to article directories. What I like to do is put the original article up on my blog or website and get it indexed then submit the a smaller version to article directories.