The Truth About Duplicate Content

I came across the Ezine Word­Press plu­gin the other day. Basi­cally it will post your blog post on Ezinearticles.com when you pub­lish it on your blog. So your arti­cle will be going to two dif­fer­ent places. This may sound great but since I started my writ­ing pro­fes­sion I heard about the dan­gers of “dupli­cate con­tent”. Which basi­cally says, if search engines, such as Google finds your con­tent in more than one place then you get docked for it.

You can lose pager­ank and search engine sta­tus. Now who would want that to hap­pen? Not me! It scared me from the idea, so I avoided hav­ing dupli­cate con­tent at all costs! Then later on I heard it was okay to have your con­tent in other places after the search engines have already checked it out. Appar­ently they know which one was first and count that as the orig­i­nal. Apparently.

So, the debates went on and I kept find­ing log­i­cal expla­na­tions both for hav­ing your arti­cle in more than one place and for hav­ing it in one place only. Even­tu­ally I just kept doing what I was doing because it worked and I wasn’t find­ing a clear answer to the ongo­ing debate. Which brings me back to the other day when I found out about the Ezines plugin.

It sounds like a neat idea but the first thing that popped in my head was the dreaded dupli­cate con­tent. If your sub­mit­ting the same arti­cle to Ezines at the same time you post on your blog isn’t that against the search engine rules? Come to find out, not quite.

I started look­ing through the com­ments to find the answer as I knew I wasn’t the only one with this con­cern. And of course I found a com­menter that shared my thoughts and asked about it. Thanks to a help­ful com­menter and the Ezines staff, I now have an answer.

Dupli­cate con­tent isn’t that big of a deal. The idea of dupli­cate con­tent comes from search engines try­ing to stop spam­mers. If it is your con­tent, your more than wel­come to spread it out to other sources and re-purpose it. In fact, Ezines encour­ages you to sub­mit arti­cles there that you already have posted on your blog. Com­ing from a source as big as Ezines gives that state­ment a lot of credibility.

But just to clear this up once and for all let’s take a look at what Google says about it in this post from Google them­selves. The dupli­cate con­tent penalty is designed to stop peo­ple that are try­ing to trick the search engines, not peo­ple that are re-purposing their own con­tent. Straight from the source. Kind of hard to argue with that eh?

So go ahead post on your blog and Ezines. It will help you get more expo­sure and more con­tent. If you use other arti­cle sub­mis­sion sites I would take a look at their own rules, some do require unique content.

One last thing: Some peo­ple sub­mit their con­tent to a bunch of sub­mis­sion sites. I don’t know how this is with the dupli­cate con­tent rule, but is it really nec­es­sary? Find a few, good qual­ity sub­mis­sion sites and just use those. If your arti­cle is seen by enough eyes and goes viral, it’s going to be every­where anyways.

~Chris

Links for more information:

Arti­cle on Ezinearticles.com about dupli­cate con­tent
Google’s rules on dupli­cate con­tent
Ezin­earti­cles word­press plugin

What are you thoughts on dupli­cate con­tent? Do you think you should worry about where you sub­mit it or should you just put your con­tent every­where?

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I’m glad to see you back at The OMV. I hope your enjoy­ing your time. Feel free to con­tact me for any­thing and if you haven’t already, don’t for­get to sub­scribe to The OMV Newslet­ter. Leave a com­ment too! I’d love to hear from you.