Work At Home Information

This question seems to always crop up on the Warrior Forum, usually in connection with publishing the same article to one’s blog and to a number of article directories.

Those who believe in the the duplicate content penalty will insist that you must “spin” your content to a certain percentage of uniqueness, in order to fool Google into picking it up as completely unique content and thereby avoiding the “duplicate content” penalty.

Those who believe that the duplicate content penalty is as much a myth as the existence of the tooth fairy say that you can post content that is exactly the same all over the Internet, and Google will index it all, regardless of how many places it already exists.

So, is the duplicate content penalty a myth, or does it in fact, exist?

To answer the question, we must first take a look at the origins of this notion of a duplicate content penalty. In the early days of the internet, it was very easy to get your site listed number 1 in Google merely by putting up mirror sites that were exact duplicates of each other and link them together.

Realizing what was happening, Google’s programmers adjusted their search algorithms to filter out websites that were exact duplicates of each other in order to stop this practice.

Accordingly, in essence, yes, there is a sort of duplicate content penalty in place but not in the way that the believers view it. It only applies to entire websites or web pages. It does NOT apply to the content within those web pages.

Google does not care if you write an article and post it on your blog, and then take that article and post exactly the same article to Ezinearticles, GoArticles, etc. Google only cares if you create entire websites and web pages that are exact mirrors of each other and link them together.

If there was a penalty,such as the believers suggest, then article directories and content syndication could not exist. Think about it: when you publish your articles to the article directories, you’re giving permission for anyone to come and copy your article, as is, and post it to their website or blog, with your resource box intact, of course. If there was a duplicate content penalty, why would anyone want to do this? There would be no chance they’d be indexed by Google, so what would be the point?

In closing, like all myths, there is a grain of truth to the duplicate content penalty myth, but it is still a myth. Syndicate your content all you want, as is, without fear.