I have been submitting my articles to a number of article directories. Which means each article is in like 20 different places. I have read that this can be bad because of duplicate content. I don't put the article on my website, just everywhere else with anchor text back to my home page. Could this be hurting me?

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Holland Michigan Real Estate | Real Estate Holland Michigan | Holland MI Real Estate

I always thought it did, but SEO experts here say otherwise. Logic tells me that if Google devalues a page because of duplicate content, they would also devalue the links on that page...but, I think most people here agree that it doesn't.

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Matt Cutt's Comments From His Blog

What I was saying was: I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site.

However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

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Benjamin Dona, Broker/Owner
Gulf Coast Associates, Realtors
Metro Mortgage Company
Bonita Springs Real Estate | Florida Home Loans | Naples Real Estate

If the duplicate content issues do not exist on your internal pages then you are not being hurt. Duplicate content is never a penalty, but its a filter, which means your website can lose ranking for duplicated content by filteration.

My rule of thumb is to always reoptimize the article on my site to make it appear as unique as possible, this includes changing the article title, changing keywords, etc. Usually the published article is less optimized while the article on my site is most optimized for targeted search traffic.

I hope this helps!

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New Home Builder in Palm Coast

I've started re-optimizing my articles as well. I'm kind of testing it out right now. The filtration instead of "penalization" theory makes a lot of sense. I think Google is wise enough to not penalize people for off-site techniques that could be beyond the site owner's control.

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chane, let me know what you find out.

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Holland Michigan Real Estate | Real Estate Holland Michigan | Holland MI Real Estate

It is better to write unique articles for each directory, google loves to index unique content and because of this, there are possiblity that your article might get on top for a keyword.

Your website won't lose any ranking. The filter tries to decides which version is the original and that is the one that comes up in the serps and the rest go into the supplemental index.

If they all link to the original then g knows which one is the original, which won't matter if none of the articles are on your site. If none of the articles are on your site you should have all the articles pint to your site (deep) and don't worry if some of them go supplemental.

The whole point of publishing articles is to get them syndicated on as many sites as you can, hopefully because other sites find your article and publish it for you.

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Serving all your Outer Banks real estate needs and for the latest OBX events visit the Outer Banks Community Forum.

awesome post. This has really helped me. I think I will start to write unique articles instead of posting the same one to various articles sources.

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jason + associates
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