Duplicate Content – What IS the Score?

Duplicate content is a much-used term online and is also hugely misunderstood! Most people believe that once you’ve written and submitted an article to one course, that it can’t be submitted again. This is where confusion starts and where people get it so wrong.

In order to make any headway on building your online business using articles, you need to understand how duplicate content really works. Let’s go through this step by step so you can see the process.
So, you create an article for your website and decide to submit it to one of the leading article directories. You do this and then do nothing more, thinking that you can’t use the same article on your blog or submit to any other article directory.

You may believe that Google will only show one result for that piece of content. This is simply NOT the case. You can submit the article to as many different directories/blogs/websites as you wish – in which case, you may be thinking: we’ve defined what duplicate content is not, so what IS it?

Duplicate content merely means when you have the SAME content on the SAME website more than once......

This means that if you have an article on your home page and then put in on another page – this is duplicate content. People often used this method so try and fill out their websites and also to try and get their sites ranked higher by Google.

However, you CAN put the same article on a different website. For example, you’ve done your keyword research, you’ve written your article carefully and you’ve put it onto your site or blog. Now you can also submit this same article to different places, such as the following:

- Ezine Articles
- Other article directories
- Newsletter/Ezine
- Squidoo


So the article appears in all these different places but it’s NOT duplicate content! The same article is on different websites.

If you submit any of your articles to other people’s blogs, as a guest writer, you might find that the owner of the blog will only allow you to submit original articles. If this is the case, then you won’t be able to submit this particular article, which has appeared elsewhere, unless you have agreed with them that you may do this.

Article directories are full of duplicate content – most articles appear on blogs and websites and have then been uploaded by the author to the directories for more exposure.

In ending therefore, there’s only one thing you need to remember when considering the rules of duplicate content:

Your article can appear on as many different websites as you wish!