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Article Websites and Google Duplicate Content Penalties |
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by Michael Ellis (5/25/2006) You've spent the last 3 months typing away at your computer creating a couple dozen wonderful unique articles that you've posted to your website and got indexed in Google. You're very happy with the position you're getting with the search engine results for the keywords in your articles, and your website traffic has increased 10x as a result. You then decide you would like a little more exposure and submit your articles to various online article websites for other website owners to use, of course with full reference to your website. The unfortunate truth is, you may have just killed all of your Google search engine traffic for those articles due to Google duplicate content penalties! Just to state the obvious, duplicate content in the Internet world refers to webpage text that is the same across two or more webpages. At the point of this writing, Google has implemented a duplicate content filter that checks for duplicate content on each website that it indexes. The complete details as to how this filter operates (what exactly constitutes duplicate content) aren't freely available, but in my opinion, it doesn't seem to operate with fairness in mind. Once the Google duplicate content filter has identified that more than 1 web page share the same content (to what degree is not known), it then makes a determination as to which site it likes best. There are many factors it uses to determine which site it likes best – you might be wise to guess that they are the same factors it uses to determine which site places where in its search results. The problem is, if you've submitted your articles to a major article website, then you've just entered your website into a PR slugfest with that article website, and Google will be refereeing! The winner of the slugfest will take all of the Google search results for your articles. Why? Because the loser's webpages that contain these articles will be dropped from the Google index. Yes, even if they are where the content originated. To make matters worse, most of the popular article websites have page ranks of 6 or greater. If you're submitting your articles to article websites, then you're probably looking to gain page rank, nonetheless have to go through a PR battle with a more established website for the right to have some search results for your own content! In conclusion, submitting content to an article website can be very benefitial for your website. However, don't submit all of your content if you're still looking for that content to bring in search results from Google. You may want to create two versions of your content – one for your website, and a summarized version for the article websites. Author - Michael Ellis (Email: michael@victorykey.com) Talk more about this topic in our VictoryKey Internet Marketing Forum
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