I Want To Submit Articles To Increase Backlinks, Should I Be Wary Of Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is when one of your articles appears within your site or on multiple sites across the Internet. The hysteria surrounding ‘duplicate content’ comes from two sources:

1. Those who haven’t conducted any research or don’t understand duplicate content. They proceed to spread misinformation and fear.
2. ‘Gurus’ and ‘experts’ who use fear to sell and upsell their products and services.

Search engines want to display the latest and most relevant content in their search results. Articles make up a large percentage of search engine results. But they don’t want to show the same article multiple times within their results.

I applaud their effort. When I search for information, I don’t want to read the same article multiple times. But where does that leave article marketers?

Within Domain vs. Cross Domain

Duplicate content can occur in two different ways: within your domain or across multiple domains. If your article appears more than once on your site then it is duplicate content within your domain. When your article appears on different external web sites it is called cross domain duplicate content.

Handling duplicate content and articles on your site is fairly simple to deal with. Adjust and configure your robots.txt, htaccess, and robot meta-tags to prevent duplicate articles from being index by search engines.

For article marketing, cross domain duplicate content is where most marketers and entrepreneurs have questions. Duplicate articles can appear on multiple sites in one of three ways.

• Your article was scraped by another site from a RSS feed
• You submitted your article to multiple article directories
• Someone republished your article on their site

Filtering vs. Penalty

Many marketers don’t have a clear understanding of how duplicate content affects their bottom line. The two concepts you have to understand are filtering vs. penalty. These are two separate actions that search engines take when dealing with duplicate content.

If a search engine finds duplicate content it can either determine the original source of the article or penalize the article. Penalizing the article involves removing the article from search engines’ index or downgrading the value of the article so that it doesn’t rank high in search results.

Penalties only occur when the intent of the article is to artificially manipulate search engine results. Penalties are all about intent. If your intentions are good and comply with webmaster guidelines then there are no penalties.

For article submissions, penalties don’t apply. So don’t worry about getting penalized by Google or any other search engine for duplicate articles.

Filtering is how search engines deal with duplicate articles on multiple sites. They use their search algorithm to identify the original source of the article. They are good at identifying the source most of the time but sometimes they attribute the article to a site that has more authority than yours.

It is important to note that Google, Yahoo, Live, and other search engines don’t remove duplicate articles from their index. So you will receive multiple backlinks from submitting the same article to multiple article directories.

You will also notice that your articles will appear in search results multiple times for the same keyword. This will only occur if your articles are on multiple sites.

Prevention and Management

When another site is recognized as the original site of your article there is nothing you can do. The best thing you can do is to try and prevent other sites from being recognized as the source of your articles. Here are some tips to help you get recognized as the original source of your articles.

• Post your articles to your site first before submitting it to article directories.
• Make sure your articles are accessible by search engine crawlers and not blocked by the robots.txt, robots meta-tags, and htaccess files.
• Make sure your RSS feeds are set to short. Don’t syndicate the full feed or scrapers may take credit for your articles.
• Make sure your site is in compliance with each search engines’ respective webmaster guidelines.
• Make sure that your article contains a link back to your site in it. Better yet, a link back to your original article.
• Resolve in yourself that you could be outranked in search results for some of your articles.