Duplicate Content and Article Marketing Exposed

There is a lot of confusion about duplicate content and article marketing online, especially when it comes to whether you should publish an article on your website and then distribute it to article directories. As most of us know, the king of search engines is Google and getting your content to show up in key word searches is crucial.

So, I’d like to do a little debunking and get some answers.

Duplicated or syndicated content has been frowned upon because it can take away traffic away from your website. For example, if you submit an article on ezine and have a duplicate article on your website, you don’t want all the traffic to go to ezine, right? In the same respect, you also want your blog posts, press releases, forum posts, social networking, and the like to be working for you, not competing with your primary website.

Here are some ways to duplicate content and article marketing work for you:

Repurpose: The idea of repurposing is to take one idea and rewrite or repurpose it in various ways. If you repurpose an article, you can be strategic about your content and drive traffic to your website first and foremost. 

Repurpose tip: Your website should have the original and best version of the article. Your job, then, is to take that article and make a few subtle changes. One suggestion is to change the headline, first paragraph, and those final sentences where you emphasize your point for the last time.

Don’t duplicate on your website: What this means is that if you have two web pages on your domain with virtually the same content, Google is going to get confused and ignore one of them.

Duplication tip The most important part here is actually your titles and meta tags. Make sure they are different on each page. If you’ve got duplicate content due to having a printer friendly version of a webpage on your site, do Google a favor and block search engines from indexing the printer friendly version. In this way you’re actually going to get more hits on your content because the page you want people to find is getting indexed correctly. Also, be sure to use relevant keywords and descriptions—and make sure each of your web pages is unique.

There are many article directories out there and ways to truly leverage great content. Make sure your duplicate content and article marketing efforts are distributed and repurposed correctly for best results.