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Every silly SEO expert likes to give their weird advice about duplicate content.  They talk about duplicate content being a “myth”.  They refer to Google’s Webmaster Blog as though Google is going to tell you the truth about how to manipulate your way into the top search results.  That just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

What Google talks about is of importance to very few of us.

Google discusses how to deal with duplicate content on your site in their blog post about it.  For people that make their money through Adsense, this is relevant.

What about the rest of us?

What about content marketers that syndicate videos, articles, press releases, and blog posts?

Their blog post doesn’t apply to us directly and they don’t discuss our main concerns at all.

They reveal some slightly relevant details, but unless you make your money through content sites, I’d recommend not wasting your time reading it.

Instead, read this post and apply what it teaches to your content marketing efforts.

Here’s the truth about the duplicate content penalty.

When it comes to content marketing:  Google is only going to give you credit for the first 3 or 4 times it finds your article, video, press release, or blog post if it is exactly the same as the other versions.

This means that you can submit an article to 300 directories and you’ll get credit for 3 or 4 of them.  Google says “I’ve seen this before, so you don’t get credit for it”.

Your new links don’t count.

The amount of times it’s been reposted and syndicated don’t count.

Spinning your content solves this problem, bust nearly all content spinners do it wrong.

All popular content spinners do it wrong and there’s a much better way.

It’s time to solve this once and for all.  NOW.

The Problem And The Solution.

When putting out an article, you’ll get credit for the first few Google finds.

This also happens with other types of content, like videos and press releases.  Google will find them  In fact, it even indexes them.

They end up so buried that nobody will ever find them.

To see it, search for the title of one of your articles like this: “your title here”.  By putting quotes around the title, you’re telling Google to only provide results that have that exact phrase in the exact order that you ask for it.

You’ll see a lot of times that Google has discovered your article.  Yet, It shows only the ones that have the most authority when someone searches the keyword term you’ve targeted.

You can easily fix this.

Spin the text for all of your content.

Spin your content properly and Google doesn’t see duplicate content at all.  It sees dozens of original versions of your content.

That gives you better results, more backlinks, and most importantly, it gives you what article marketing is supposed to give you in the first place – measurable results for your efforts.

The whole idea of article marketing is to get your content put out by others for more links and traffic.

An article syndicated through a single directory should get picked up at least a few times.  If you spin your content the right way, that should happen for many of the directories and you’ll get credit for the first few times your article is picked up by sites, on top of the credit you get from the directory posting.

This is MUCH better than simply submitting a single article to dozens or hundreds of directories to only get credit for 3 or 4 of them.

Here are 2 key benefits of spinning your content (not just articles)

1.  Better results.

2.  Target more than one keyword term with one idea or marketing angle.

Getting results is the reason we spend time writing content, blogging, creating videos, etc…

Why would anyone be satisfied with 3 or 4 backlinks from a great article?

The ability to target more than one keyword term with a piece of content is amazing and the results are, too.

With a single video, I targeted 5 keyword phrases and ranked in the top 3 for 3 of them within 4 hours.  That is a measurable result!

Most Content Spinners Suck.

Spinning software the way most programs do it will limit your results.

Nearly all of them are based upon the idea of spinning individual words or phrases inside your content to make it appear different.

The more automated they are, the less readable your content ends up.

They pull words from a Thesaurus to replace your original words.

Yet, software is not smart enough to use proper grammar rules and makes you look silly.

The English language is extremely complicated.  I’ve never found a software that does this right.

Semi-automated ones take a lot of time to find words to replace yours.

When I created my content spinner, The Spin Wizard, I knew this was something that had to be fixed.

The solution was to have the core spinning function be based upon sentences, with word and phrase spinning added in to make content more unique.

By spinning this way, you rewrite sentences to say the exact same thing using different words.

Rewording what you write is so much easier than spinning by word.

Google Is Not As Smart As Most People Think!

On July 8 of 2006 I announced the death of the link exchange via a press release.

The funny thing is that just a few months ago, I found a very competitive keyword being dominated through link exchanges as one of their core link building method.

You’ll find a blogger blog ranking #1 for “make money online”.

Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find their “link partners” listed there.  You’ll also see link exchange partners in their “blogroll” on the right side of the blog.

I couldn’t believe it.

Link exchanges don’t work well, but they do still work.

The point in telling you this is that Google is not as smart as most of us think.

Everyone worries about them figuring out what we’re doing.

We all give them far too much credit.

Win The Duplicate Content War.

Calling it a duplicate content penalty is not exactly right.  It does exist, but instead of being a true penalty, it’s more of a natural way for Google to give credit for relevance.

Google is simply choosing the most relevant version of the content that it finds.

The first thing it will do is give positioning to the sites with the most authority.  Sites like EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, YouTube, Viddler, PrWeb, Webwire, Squidoo, and Hubpages have a very high level of authority and you’ll find them ranking for longer keyword phrases very easily.

The next thing you can do to defeat the “penalty” is to build links to your content, whether it’s an article, a video, or a press release is to build links to it.  RSS feeds, Social Bookmarks, and blog posts are great locations to send some link love to your content and get them to rank better.

This doesn’t just apply to content you put out, but to duplicate websites or web pages.  Build more links and outrank the originals.  This shows Google that you’re the authority.

Spinning the content also helps.  If you do that, there’s no issue with it being a duplicate.

The Spin Wizard is available for free and lets you spin by sentence AND by word or term.  It is also the only one that gives you the ability to spin the text associated with numerous types of content:  Videos, Articles, Press Releases, Podcasts, RSS, Social Bookmarks, Classified Ads, and Web Directories.

This is a controversial topic amongst marketers, so please share your thoughts in the comments section.

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