My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
Duplicate content seems to cause many of us SEO fears. Will we be punished for duplicate content? Probably not! But does it help SEO directly? Not really, other than providing Google many avenues to find your article. Still, there is a strategy that guarantees indexing and high SERP rankings (without any concern about duplicate content!).
Question from my friend Carol Ann Wiley (from Retired and Ready; Twitter: CashNana):
“The question for today is about the dreaded duplicate content issue:
There seems to be a difference in opinion about this when it comes to writing your articles and putting them both on your site and also submitting to article directories.
Some will tell you that you should NEVER submit an article to a directory and also put it on your site.
Others will tell you that if you put it on your site and then submit to a directory; that the duplicate content onus is on the article directory.
Others will tell you that if you submit it to the article directory and then put it on your site, it is just what others are doing who see your article in the directory and put it on their site.”
Matt’s Response:
Here is my two-cents on this duplicate content issue…
Because people are able to take and post your articles from article directories, search engines really should not punish you for this (it is out of your control). Still, major search engines (like Google) are more than to ultimately index one of the pages.
I remember when I first started doing a lot of article writing (and a lot of submitting) I was doing just this: submitting to everyone and everything (including my own website). Initially, a lot of these pages got indexed (and my backlinks were quite plentiful). Then, a few weeks later I found a lot of these backlinks suddenly disappeared. Not only that, but the one page that WAS appearing in the search engine was not my website, but some random article directory.
I think this is the problem: Google will ultimately choose the web page that it feels is most important and that may not be your own website. That sucks.
Remember that one of your main goals is to get YOUR site pages indexed (not the article directories, or for that matter, someone else’s website or blog!).
I now write two articles for this task. One article that appears on my website as a static page (this is my “best content”). The second article is re-written (not spun!). That is where I splatter it all over the place (and I backlink to my first article and usually a “money page” on my website).
Here is a diagram:
So now two things happen:
1) I am not too concerned which article Google indexes for my second article. All I care about is the backlink pointing back to my first article and the money page.
2) Now I am creating backlinks for both my money page now AND a HIGHLY RELEVANT page related to the second article. That is going to catch Google’s attention! (And don’t forget to point your first article on your internal website back to your money page, too!).
By doing this, we are pumping up the “money” page both internally and externally and we are placing the first article into a likely position to be indexed (more likely than the second, submitted article because of all the backlinks from the second article).
Duplicate content? Who cares now! We now achieve our goals of creating backlinks as well as getting a new page indexed within our site.
And again, those are my two cents!
Cheers…matt
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That makes sense Matt. I suppose what I should be doing is duplicating my own content, to an extent. I post soly to my site, or to an article site, with no content duplication. The articles, if I read what you are saying correctly, is kinda like mini billboards around the web, pointing back to your main (good) article and therefore will not affect the main article ranking. I will have to try that out with some of my posts.
Thanks Matt,
Jeromy
June 1st, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Thanks Matt for such a thorough response to my question.
I didn’t expect such an in-depth answer; but I guess I should have known that that is the way you do things. I rather liked Jeremy’s comment likening your process to “mini-billboards” driving attention back to the main site. More articles, more articles and need for more social sites to be the mini-billboards. Good job, thanks again.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:49 am
I do like the idea of “mini-billboards” but also think about it like throwing spaghetti at a wall. If I want to make sure some spaghetti is going to stick, I want to throw a lot of it up there. That will tell people I’m eating spaghetti. Of course, I save a bowl of spaghetti for myself (like I do internally on my site!)
OK, bad metaphors this morning!
cheers…matt
June 4th, 2009 at 6:03 am
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November 17th, 2009 at 1:59 am