Article marketing: duplicate content concerns

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Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

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I’m a big fan of article marketing. It’s the easiest way to get known online, and get Web writing gigs if you’re marketing your Web writing services. It’s a great way to get backlinks to new sites you’re creating too.

I write at least a couple of articles a day - sometimes many more, for my own sites and others’.

However, whenever I mention article marketing, the “duplicate content” question comes up.

There’s a lot of misinformation around about duplicate content, as it applies to posting your articles on your own sites, as well as on article directories. FWIW, I usually post my articles on my sites AND post the same article on article directories too. I’ve never noticed any ill effects from this practice.

Jill Whalen has an excellent piece on “The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth”, and says:

If your own bylined articles are getting published elsewhere, that’s a good thing. There’s no need for you to provide a different version to other sites or to not allow them to be republished at all. The more sites that host your article, the more chances you will have to build your credibility as well as to gain links back to your site through a short bio at the end of the article. If the site your article is hosted on shows up instead of yours, so be it. There’s nothing wrong with that, as your site can be easily clicked to from your bio; the pros far outweigh the cons. In many cases, Google still shows numerous instances of articles in searches, but even if they eventually show only one version, that’s still okay.

(The emphasis on the above quote is mine.)

I used article marketing extensively in 2002 and 2003, then stopped using it. Now in 2007, I’m back to using it again, because for the time invested, it gets you more bang for your buck than any other marketing method.