How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties & Google’s Dog House When Article Marketing
Here’s a quick tip on how to avoid duplicate content penalties when article marketing. Many new internet marketers accidentally get their websites and blogs in Google’s dog house when they launch article marketing initiatives on a brand new web property.
Even after putting in a significant amount of time and resources promoting a website, many sites simply do not gain traction on search engines because of duplicate content penalties. A common reason why this happens is because the marketer has likely submitted close or duplicate content to article directories online thinking they are benefiting the original web property.
First of all, you should avoid duplicate content submission for marketing purposes. Second, if you do, then ensure that the original content on the original web property has already been indexed, or included in search engine listings.
Some marketers believe that it is acceptable to syndicate the original content online and that it wouldn’t be responded to with duplicate content penalties. It helps that certain websites like press release syndication websites proactively syndicate the same piece of news to thousands of avenues online.
In addition, Ezine Articles, one of the premium article directories online allows republication of the original article providing the author / submitter holds the copyrights to the article. So what’s a marketer to conclude?
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties
Without debating whether syndicating duplicate content is acceptable, let’s discuss what a marketer can do to avoid duplicate content penalties.
Search engines consider a content piece duplicate if it already has the same or similar content in its index, or database of websites, blogs, links etc on the entire world wide web. The key is therefore to ensure that your original content is picked up by search engines before anyone else does and republishes it.
If your website or blog is brand new, chances are search engines are slow to visit or crawl your web property. But if an older, more established website was to take your content and republish it, it is highly likely that search engines will first notice the content on the older and more established website. This is a key reason why many internet marketers submit their marketing articles to well established directories such as Ezine Articles, Squidoo, Hub Pages and the likes.
So in a world wide web loaded with heavy duty veterans, how do you ensure your original content is indexed immediately so you can avoid duplicate content penalties when you begin to market your web property? The answer is social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking sites are some of the most dynamic and fastest growing web properties that are well respected and frequently visited by all major search engines. Because of both the credibility and functionality factor, I often bookmark each and every webpage on my niche sites before I embark on an article marketing campaign.
The best part of this process is that it takes less than a minute to bookmark a webpage. You can bookmark your webpages manually, or through a service like OnlyWire which I use to mass bookmark a single webpage to several social bookmarking websites.
I like to use OnlyWire because once I’ve set up my social bookmarking accounts, I never have to do anything again except bookmark my webpages through the bookmarking dashboard which appears as a small icon on the lower right hand side of my desktop.
What I like best about this tool is that it allows you to schedule bookmarking tasks well into the future. Let’s say you have a niche site that has 10 webpages. In order to not appear as spamming the search engines, you can schedule to bookmark one webpage a day for the next 10 days all in one sitting and never have to worry about it again.
Personally I use to paid version of the program because it gives me added flexibility and functionality. However, you DO NOT have to pay for OnlyWire. You can download a limited version of OnlyWire for free and start using it to bookmark your webpages.
I started out using the free version and have to say that it does a good enough job to ensure you avoid duplicate content penalties by immediately getting your webpages indexed or crawled by search engines.
Once your webpages have been picked up by search engines and included in their listing, you no longer have to worry about duplicate content penalties resulting from either you syndicating the original article online or someone else stealing your content.
Readers: Have you ever been hammered by duplicate content penalties? When did you realize this, how did you find out and what did you do to get out of Google’s penalty box?
Note: I use OnlyWire in my marketing efforts. I am an affiliate of their social bookmarking services and am awarded a small commission each time someone purchases their services through my affiliate links.
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17 Responses to “How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties & Google’s Dog House When Article Marketing”
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Sunil
duplicate content is a killer to any blog, the search engines will penalize a blog like that, and they will see this type of blog as spam
that said, do you think it is permissible/acceptable for a small percentage of your content to be duplicate?
Sunil, personally I don’t think it’s a good idea to have any of your content duplicated. However sometimes it can’t be avoided, such as in the case of someone scraping your content!
There’s certainly no benefit to having duplicate content whatsoever. I understand about the benefits of syndication but for most bloggers I don’t think it really applies.
to the extent possible, the more unique pieces the better. in the event you syndicate to directories, as long as the content is on your web property first and indexed, it will only help. my traffic logs prove it. there is also a PR building aspect to it.
Thanks for the info, I will check out this program later on.
Sunil
yes I do think its acceptable for a small percentage of content to be duplicate, because alot of marketers when they write they show examples, most of the time they take a sentence or something from another person’s blog and post it in their article as the example, while they write their article from scratch.
If I was inspecting an article like that I would see that, its a great article and not duplicate content because the writer was only showing an example for that small portion fo the article
true, those instances also apply. thanks for adding
thanks for this,glad i came across you and read this info, I have heard that duplicate content is a nightmare to any blog
if your blog is built based on duplicate content alone then yes, it can spell nightmares.
Sunil,
do you have any idea what is considered “duplicate content” and what is considered “similar content”? For example, at the bottom of most of my pages I have a section with links to pages on my site that have additional info. The link text is always the same. Is this considered “duplicate content” or is Google smart enough to figure out that it is helping the reader with navigation?
great question Anna. content that is in sidebars, footers, headers, though duplicate and repetitive on each page, is not considered duplicate for the purposes of this discussion. search engines are sophisticated enough to distinguish between the body of the page/post vs the “side widgets”. make sense?
Simple advice is do anything you can to stay in Googles good books. One problem with new sites is they want too much too soon. Google puts lot of weight on domain age, so sometimes just be patient.
Kurt, the problem is that many of those who have been “slapped” claim to have followed all Google terms and conditions. this is what concerns me sometimes…but you are right, non aggressive marketing is always ideal
Wow, once again it occurs to me just how little I really know about the broader internet world. While I’ve heard about duplicate content penalties before, much of this was news to me. I’ve definitely got a lot to learn, it seems.
there is always something new Roger…the beauty of life
I don’t get, how “social bookmarking” can be better than “article submission”?
where does it say that Austin?