Same Article Submitted 50 Times-Duplicate Content?

[Mark Z]

I know it's common practice to submit an article to 50-60 article directory sites, but I was wondering why doesn't google frown upon this? Isn't this considered duplicate content submitting the same article in 50 different places? On that note why don't we submit the same blog to 20 different blog sites? I'm just thinking every blog I write I should post it on my own personal site, REW, and Activerain. Isn't that the same concept that we do with the whole article submission?

[SEO Nick]

It's arguable; but I (as well as many others) believe that the links maintain their value even if a duplicate article is posted and the page is devalued.

As for blogs, it's against OUR rules to post your blog posts here as well as other places. I don't know about the other sites.

[Mark Z]

Fair Enough, Thanks

[erogers]

It will likely be seen as duplicate content and you probably won't get links counted from many of those 50 sites - especially by Google. I use an article spinner to vary the text of my articles for re-submission to the different article sites. Some folks will wag their fingers at me for doing this but I don't care. As long as the article is readable and gets the point across and is a legitimate article and not a junk spam article made up of non-sensical snippets of text there's no difference between this and varying anchor text. Anyways, if you want to see if this type of thing is right for you you can check it out - it's free - www dot spontent dot com - look for the JetSpinner.

Just spend a couple hours crafting an article the right way and you can create hundreds of variations that vary in length and content enough to likely pass the dup content filter.

[KenNadreau]

The only thing Google says about duplicate content is they don't approve of people plastering the same content over and over again on a single site to fool the indexbots into thinking the site is uber-relevant. That's all they say on the subject. Everything else you may have heard is a marketing ploy to get you to buy article spinning software.

Here's why I say this . . .

Having the same content spread out over 50, 60, or 1400 article directories is about popularity. When a directory adds your article to their system it's like a "yes" vote for the information. They're in essence saying the content is good and they want to share it with everyone.

This builds weight to the content as well as the links the content points to.

Now what confuses people is when submitting the same article they may only get one listing for it in a search query. But that's fine because all the other instances of the article give weight to that one listing which brings it higher toward the #1 spot. This is because the article has a great deal of popularity spread over a vast amount of sites, and though Google may use only the highest ranked site to list, your one article has all that popularity behind it.

But spinning an article would give you more than one listing in a search query were it not for the latest "latent context" algorithms the search engines have implemented. They can now use the context of an article to see how similar it is to another. So if you spin an article and it says basically the same thing, they'll still only use one version to list.

And even if they didn't, you could have 50 different listings for your one spun article, but with the weight of one popular vote each, they'd probably end up on page 20 in a search listing. You're better off to get the weight of many popular votes for one article than one popular vote for many.

Then consider what those article spinners turn your article into. Most are barely readable, so thinking about the "human reader" element, do you really want people viewing your work in that light?

[erogers]

....Everything else you may have heard is a marketing ploy to get you to buy article spinning software...

....This builds weight to the content as well as the links the content points to...

...Then consider what those article spinners turn your article into. Most are barely readable...

I'm going to respond to this thread only once because I know there are some pretty hard-line people with fairly entrenched ideas and my job isn't to try and change this opinion - it's to give OP some new avenues to explore.

As to these comments, hard to make money on something that's free (article spinning is FREE to use) so noone is really making money here - and no, I'm not a spontent representitive trying to drum up users or something.

Your second argument is speculation as to what G does with its algorithm. In this arena, your speculation is about as valid as mine. Personally, I think G discredits all versions of an article except the one they consider "genuine" - it won't index them - it won't rank them - it won't credit any links - the page won't ever get page rank - it won't ever pass page rank or any kind of "juice" - they are basically useless for SEO. (The whole reason why there was such an uproar about article "claim jumping" a while ago where sites would steal content, be indexed first and therefore be considered the "genuine" version by Google). Some versions do occasionally slip through the dup content filter but the vast majority won't.

As for the third comment, that's a matter of how hard you work and it's one of the same arguments I heard last time - "but those spun articles are garbage!". If you work hard at it and do it properly, it will be just the same as re-writing 200 different versions by hand (which even many of the hard-liners that hate spinners admit to doing for the top 10 or so article sites).

[KenNadreau]

. . .As to these comments, hard to make money on something that's free (article spinning is FREE to use) so noone is really making money here - and no, I'm not a spontent representitive trying to drum up users or something.

Article spinning may be free now, but when this whole duplicate content issue came up it wasn't.

Your second argument is speculation as to what G does with its algorithm. In this arena, your speculation is about as valid as mine. Personally, I think G discredits all versions of an article except the one they consider "genuine" - it won't index them - it won't rank them - it won't credit any links - the page won't ever get page rank - it won't ever pass page rank or any kind of "juice" - they are basically useless for SEO. (The whole reason why there was such an uproar about article "claim jumping" a while ago where sites would steal content, be indexed first and therefore be considered the "genuine" version by Google). Some versions do occasionally slip through the dup content filter but the vast majority won't.

So what you're saying here is if you place an article on your PR0 site then submit it to article directories with PR5 and up, Google will show the article on your PR0 site and not anywhere else?

That would be an interesting experiment, but I'd suspect the article on your PR0 site wouldn't show up in a listing because the weight of the PR5 sites would over take it even if you post it on your site first.

So then, where does popularity come in? Is that just a myth? And wouldn't that suggest article submission to be a bad idea? I mean, if you post your article to one article directory and other people use it on their site, wouldn't that defeat the purpose? And then why would they if it didn't do then any good?

What I find interesting is the article directories are among the fastest risers in PR on the web. I've watch some jump from PR0 to PR5 in just 3 months. Yet 99% of all their content can be found elsewhere on other directories and reprinted on other sites.

How does duplicate content fit into that scenario?

As for the third comment, that's a matter of how hard you work and it's one of the same arguments I heard last time - "but those spun articles are garbage!". If you work hard at it and do it properly, it will be just the same as re-writing 200 different versions by hand (which even many of the hard-liners that hate spinners admit to doing for the top 10 or so article sites).

So what's the point of spinning when you can just write a new article in about the same amount of time?

And, if you have 200 articles all spun from one and saying basically the same thing with different words, wouldn't that lead your readers to think you didn't really know much more on the topic?

[Mark Z]

Has anyone signed up for the service that www dot spontent com offers that submits your article to over 470 article directories and they make your content unique. This seems to good to be true or one hell of a value. Does it work?

[erogers]

First, to Mark, I don't use the above listed service for distribution - only spinning - so I don't know how good their service is. My guess is you can probably do the same with This List

Next to Ken - hopefully I can help you understand a few things - be aware - I don't know all the answers either but there are several concepts that are getting mixed up here.

AFAIK the service I talked about above is freeware so it is and has always been free.

Regarding an article posted on a PR0 vs a PR5 - if the article was indexed first on the PR0 site and a duplicate was found on a PR5 site, not only would the article on the PR5 site still not be ranked first, it wouldn't even be indexed due to it being caught in the duplicate content filter.

If, for the purposes of speculation, it wasn't caught in the duplicate content filter depending on the strength of the page that it was posted on (likely also PR0 because no article site I know of posts articles with direct outbound links on a home page - most post articles as new seperate interior pages) then it may or may not outrank the same article posted on the other PR0 site.

But we're getting to a major issue here in that PR and SERP are often not directly related. Don't take PR as an indication of how powerful or popular a site is or even how much PR it passes, were you to secure a link on that page. A page with completely ripped content could theoretically get a PR5 very easily by manipulating that content and then pointing a PR6 inbound to that site for a few updates. Most of the people who own directories - article or otherwise - know how to manipulate PR in order to sell posts or links. The owners of these article directories charge "sponsors" to be listed in the footers or sidebars of the directory or to sponsor certain categories for a monthly fee. But this is a whole different topic.

You are thinking of articles in one direction - as ways you can post your knowledge about a certain subject and hopefully get people to recognize your authority and click back to your site. The other (and perhaps bigger) reason to do article submissions is from a pure SEO standpoint - that is, to secure a unique inbound link from article directories. In point of fact, I would rather someone find an article I wrote on my own website than an article directory - so what is the point of submitting an article?

SEO is the answer. Unique one-way inbound links. But in order to get one of those, the page containing your article on the directory you submit it to has to be indexed. In order for that to happen, it has to pass the duplicate content filter. In order for that to happen, the article (and code of the page hosting the article) has to vary by a certain % from any other article posted on any other site Google has, to that point, indexed.

There are a lot of concepts rolled up into one ball here. My only advice is keep reading and asking questions. If you have the time, host your own link directory (I have) or article directory (I have) and see how they work. Hang out here and other places with people who do SEO work - it's an ever-changing business and requires a lot of time but you can learn a lot for free and then see if you form your own opinions on these subjects. I agree with many of the people on this site on many things - others, I disagree with, but that's the beauty of these forums, you get to see different perspectives.

[Mark Z]

So eric then what you're saying is if you are submitting the same exact article to 50 different sites, it's a pure waste of time? If you are not going to get more than 1 back link because it's the same exact article going to all 50 sites then that seems like a waste of time, correct?