Empower Network

Today I am going to cover the subject of duplicate content. It is a subject that confuses a lot of people and nobody seems to explain it anywhere. Read this article and I hope I can clear up the confusion for you.

Duplicate content what does it mean?

I watched a couple of videos this morning on this very subject. So thanks to Chris Farrell for the information. It is hugely misunderstood. Most people believe that when they create an article for their blog or website that they cannot then use the same article in say an article directory or somewhere else online.

That is simply not true, they believe that google will only list one result for the same article, wrong. If you do a search for a paragraph of an article in google you will see how many people have used the exact same article on their sites but google still lists them. So therefore this is not duplicate content.

What is duplicate content then?

Now that what we know what isn’t duplicate content, I will now explain what it is. It is when you have the same content on the same website, it may be a different page of the site but it is still the same website. Why would people do this, well people where trying to fool google into thinking their site was bigger than it actually was, hoping to get ranked higher in the search engines. But google soon got wise to this and therefore penalised people for using the same content on the same site.

Now you know what duplicate content is I will give you an example of what you could do with your article. We will take the following article as an example. I posted this article on my blog yesterday about article marketing, so the url is http://www.empowernetwork.com/frankieb/article-marketing-strategies/

Now if I then go to an article directory say article base and upload my article it would appear as
articlebase.com/articlemarketingstrategies.

I may then go to blogger.com and upload it their and it would appear as blogger.com/articlemarketingstrategies

Then say I go to squidoo and make a lens using the same article it would look like squidoo.com/articlemarketingstrategies

So as you see google would then judge these as different articles and not duplicate content even though it is exactly the same article.

I hope this has made it clear for you what you can and can’t do regarding the content you create. I wrote this article before I got round to writing one on social bookmarking. As it was vital that you understood what duplicate content was before I broached that subject. Look out for that article tomorrow.