SEO dummies need to stop giving advice. 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.
More importantly, Google is directly referring to something that doesn’t effect most 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 us?
Those of us that use video, press releases, blogs, and articles to market our businesses get no advice.
They don’t discuss our 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.
This is what the duplicate content penalty means to you.
Google will give you credit for the first 2 or 3 times it finds your content if it’s no different from the other versions it finds.
This means that you can submit an article to 300 directories and you’ll get credit for 3 or 4 of them. After that, you get no credit at all.
Your new links don’t count.
Every time it gets picked up by a website, you get nothing for it.
That’s where content spinning comes in, yet every single content spinner available does it wrong.
All popular content spinners do it wrong and there’s a much better way.
The time has come to finally solve these problems. NOW.
The Problem And The Solution.
When you put out an article, you only get credit for the first few that Google finds.
This also happens with other types of content, like videos and press releases. Google finds them. In fact, it even indexes them.
They simply end up on page 942 and never get found.
To see this for yourself, do a Google search for the title of an article you’ve submitted like this: “Your Article Title Here”. Putting quotes around a term indicates that you only want results with that phrase in that order.
You’ll find from a few dozen to hundreds of times that Google has found your article. Yet, It shows only the ones that have the most authority when someone searches the keyword term you’ve targeted.
Here’s how to fix that.
Spin the text for all of your content.
Spin your content properly and Google doesn’t see duplicate content at all. It sees a lot of original 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 goal of article marketing is to get your content syndicated to give you more backlinks 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 WAY better than sending out an article to a ton of directories and only getting credit for 2 or 3.
Here are 2 key benefits of spinning your content (not just articles)
1. Better results.
2. Targeting multiple keywords
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?
Targeting more than one keyword term is great and reduces the amount of work you have to do.
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.
Their focus on spinning words or terms is not the best way to do it.
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.
Seriously, the English language is one of the most complicated languages in existence. Software can’t “do it for you” the right way.
The semi automated ones require a lot of time as you go through and pick similar words to replace the original ones you used.
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. Their “blogroll” has more link exchanges listed.
I couldn’t believe it.
Link exchanges stink, but it still works when done on a small level.
Realize now that Google isn’t as smart as we think.
We focus on their ability to “figure out” what we do when trying to build links.
They get way too much credit.
Win With Duplicate Content.
Calling it a duplicate content penalty is not exactly right. It’s not a penalty, it’s just Google’s way of ranking sites.
Google picks the most relevant version.
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. Blog posts, RSS, social bookmarks… These are good ways to link to your content.
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.
Giving your content a thorough spinning will help, too. That will take the whole “duplicate” issue out of the game completely.
The Spin Wizard is available through Traffic Magnet and Link Wheel and it’s the only content spinner online that gives you the ability to spin by sentence and individual keywords or keyword phrases. 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.
