There is a lot of confusion about duplicate content and the harm it can do to a website. A lot of what I have read is based on blogs and forums by ‘SEO experts’ and even people with their own article directories; You would think both would know better.

Let’s get one thing straight – the duplicate content penalty is a myth. By that, I mean if you write an article on your blog, and then proceed to use the exact same content elsewhere, there is no penalty in doing this – it is called syndication.

Lets take a look at the evidence; from the official google webmaster blog;

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

‘Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.’

What this means is that when you syndicate your article to other places (article directories) your backlink still counts, and since it is pointing at your site or indeed the article itself (you DID include a backlink didnt you?) you get the credit for the original. It’s that simple.

Why is this good? Consider your target audience or customer base – no-one wants to read the same article over and over again. The search engines are actually doing you a favour by not showing the same content. Even if you respin or rewrite it the basis is still the same. Even though I would recommend rewriting the article in most instances you might also be interested to see the duplicate content case study I did recently.

So what does this all mean?

It is fine to spread your own content over the internet, rewritten or not. However, ‘auto-blogs’, scraped content, and other methods of building sites on auto-pilot are not long term money makers[1] so if you are serious about earning money from your own websites you should stay away from them.

As detailed on the same page above, when you are dealing with affiliate programs and such, you should never rely on auto-generated content from the affiliate merchant feeds. You should always rewrite it. You dont stand much hope of convincing your affiliate site is authorative over Amazon, for example. Don’t try to beat them, give your visitors something interesting to read about the products you choose to promote and the sales will come flooding in.

Footnote:
[1] Some people do make very good money through these methods. I’ve tried it, and made about $10 a month. I dont look at short term, low income money makers however. I prefer to have my empire built for long term growth. YMMV – but you might want to take a moment to reconsider any sales letters that promote these methods in the future

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