February 1, 2007 18:56
Category: Optimizing
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Duplicate content is now diminishing in value. Since backlinks are thought to curry more favor with search engines than other seo-techniques, an oft-repeated suggestion has been to write 'n' number of articles and then post them to 'n' number of article directories. This will, suggestion-givers opine, generate bumper crop of backlinks pointing to your website.
Not content with mere backlinks, the suggestion-givers also say that the more your article appears in article directories, the more there is chance of getting visitors coming from those directories.
In reality, the picture is gloomy than you may imagine. It is easy for search engines to identify duplicate content, and so if the same content appears in multiple websites, it looses sheen in the eyes of the engines. This is the main reason many article writers (me included) have stopped submitting their pieces of labor to article directories.
When you submit your article to 'prestigious' directories like EzineArticles, it's likely that the article appears there first before you've included it in your website. Now, EzineArticles being an old content-heavy site with thousands of articles being submitted there, it'll be crawled by search engines much before your site is.
Which means EzineArticles will be seen as the first publisher of your article, and your webpage containing your own article will be taken as a duplicate content. In my understanding, something of this sort happens in keeping with algorithms of search engines.
Is duplicate content harmful? You bet it is. Your site will not be penalized as such, but it will loose 'respect' from search engines. Here is what Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Placement Inc. has to say in his article, The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication (excerpts):
Aside from the copyright concerns of using content that is not yours, your rankings (if they exist) would suffer because it is highly likely the major search engines would detect the duplicate content. As a result, the page that you create may get flagged as duplicated and it would be ignored at the very least. The page could even devalue your site's overall credibility. Credibility is a critical component of Google's algorithm so sites with less credibility tend to have a harder time staying ('sticking' if you will) in a particular ranking.
Speaking about myself, I have woken up to the folly of submitting my 'prized' articles to article directories only recently. Since then, in spite of sporadic requests, I've decided not to get into the trap of writing for others, lest my own webpage is flagged duplicate content by search engines.
Which is why when I see expert seo-practitioners still suggesting article submission as a link-building strategy to their clients (see my article, Linkbaiting, What Takes?, I conclude that either they don't keep updated, or they knowingly give wrong information.
For, it can be safely proclaimed duplicate content will find many well-ranked pages loosing out top positions in search results, and that will be sooner than later.
