The feared  “duplicate content penalty” is a subject that keeps popping up anytime people are discussing SEO, link building and particularly article marketing. The official statement from the side of Google on this matter is very clear: There is no duplicate content penalty. Despite this, the rumor about dupe-content penalties is alive and well. In this article, I want to offer a possible explanation for why this particular myth is such a pervasive one.

 
Search Listings
A possible cause for some misunderstandings pertaining the dupe-content penalty may buy cialis online have to do with something that happens quite frequently in the search results: When you type in a search query, you’ll often get a small link below a result that you can click to see more results. When you click it, you’ll see some more listings from the same domain as the result above or, in some cases, some more listings of identical content pages. The truth is that some pages are omitted from the regular search results. Typically, you’ll only ever find a maximum of two listings from the same domain and a maximum of two listings from different domains, but with identical content. In every case, however, you can click on a small link to tell Google you would like to see all of the available results. Of course, this omission of listings is in no way a penalty.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a comparable result when you do a search for it: In the results, you’ll probably see your article listed twice, on two different directories. All of the other locations where Google has found your article are hidden from the initial view, because they are all “clones”.

At first glance, this may look like some kind of a penalty, but of course it isn’t. While pages are missing from the results, all those pages are still indexed and only a click away from being displayed. The pages are also all flowing pagerank etc.

The reason for the omitted results is simple: Listing tons of identical pages or lots of pages from one and the same domain would make the results less useful to the users. And Google aims to please the users.

Article spinning
So, what about article spinning? If there’s no dupe-content penalty, can we throw away all of those spinner programs? Not at all. Although the ads for such programs often get it wrong as well: They usually go the “fear sells” route and try to make you believe that you will get punished by Google for syndicating your content across the web in an unspun fashion.In reality, article spinning does have a purpose and it can be very useful – it’s just not about avoiding some non-existant penalty. The great benefit that comes from spinning content is that you can get more long-tail traffic with it. Let’s say you write an article, spin it and then submit it to a hundred or so article directories. You now have a “net” of different combinations of words that can “catch” many different long-tail search terms. It’s a numbers game: At some point, someone’s going to search for a series of words that just so happens to be part of one of your spun articles and they will probably see that article listen in the search results. That’s long tail traffic for you. If you do a lot of article spinning and submit to many directories and blogs, you’ll eventually get lots and lots of long-tail traffic like this.

Related material: Click here to read my Best Spinner review.  —  What is Article Spinning? (Video)