Article Surfing Archive

If you've done any marketing in the last 6-12 months you've no doubt heard about the duplicate content penalty.

Web search engines (mainly google) have been slowing improving the technology they use to determine which pages get the penatly (if there really is a penalty).

So for starters let's remember that search engines index PAGES not websites. So when we are talking duplicate content penalty we are referring to pages that are getting penalized not sites.

However, if you have a site that is mainly duplicate content it may set off a red flag and get your site penalized or banned.

So, what has happened over the last 6-12 months in the online marketing world is people have come out with ways to create original content like'

- Write the content yourself. You could do this if you had a blog or were pretty passionate about a topic but otherwise this would take you forever and cost vs return on invest this way isn't worth it if you want to really create a ton of useful content.

- Hire a ghost writer from sites like rentacoder.com to write new content (probably one of the best solutions if you can get a good writer who can meet deadlines, writes original content and doesn't borrow too much) the negative of this method is cost. You will pay $4-15 for a 400+ word article.

- Buy a Private Label Rights membership and get 100+ PLR articles a month. This is OK if you find a site like thisone.com or thisone.com where you can trust the creator of the site and its userbase (and they limit the number of articles).

- If you already have PLR articles or a membership you could get a article re-writer to re create the articles. These can be expensive and some don't work very well.

Sidenote: If you don't believe there's a duplicate content penalty then another reason to not have the exact same content would be because if 100 people before you put the content on their site they were indexed first and will most likely rank much higher then you for the same thing. No ones going to page 100 to find your copy of the same content.

Ok, so you can do the above but those aren't the 5 ways I was refering to in the subject. In fact I'm talking about going beyond this.

Why? Because, you may be thinking duplicate content is an apples to apples comparison of two websites for the same content and if there's enough percentage different then it won't be duplicate content.

This is NOT 100% true. In fact it's not 50% true.

There is no percentage threshold to say what will be considered duplicate content.

Why? First remember these search engines index and crawl billions of PAGES. They aren't comparing one or two pages to each other. They are taking a sampling of data from many many sites and comparing them all.

They check things like'
1. File Name
2. Directory Name
3. Domain Name
4. IP Addresses
5. Incoming Link Text

You can see what the spider actually takes from your site by going to google and typing in site: www.mysite.com and then clicking on the 'cached' link at the end of the listing and then click 'cached text' at the top of the page that loads.

Google claims to do about 100 different things to determine a pages listing result (PageRank, Keyword Density, incoming links). So to end up with duplicate content you're going to have to set off more then one flag.

And there are a few other factors to consider. Such as the first part of the page as being more important than the lower content.

I feel this is one of the most overlooked aspects to duplicate content. The idea that what's near the top of the page is the most important to visitors and the search engines.

So what do I do to create a ton of content and feel confident I'm not going to be the same as 1,000,000 other websites?

Do everything above!

- Create your own content
- Pay for ghostwriters
- Use PLR articles and use software to re-write them

And I go one step further by adding content to the begining of the content (which can be as simple a sentence or two pulled from an RSS feed or hand typed in for each page).

Get FREE access to an article re-writer at:
http://www.FreeContentWizard.com