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 makes less than no sense.

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?

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

Their suggestions don’t apply to us.

Unless you use Adsense for your money, it’s a waste of time to even read it.

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

Here’s the truth about the duplicate content penalty.

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 Google says “I’ve already seen this one, so you get no credit for it”.

The fresh links you get don’t count at all.

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.

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

The Problem And The Solution.

When you put out an article, you only get credit for the first few that Google finds.

This is what happens when you submit an article or other type of content.  Google knows that the others are there.  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”.  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 your content submissions.

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.

Every article should get posted more than once by other webmasters.  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.

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.  Those are results to be proud of.

Most Content Spinners Suck.

The core concept of spinning content has been limited by the software programs that help you do the spinning.

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.

It pulls words from a Thesaurus database to find ones that can stand in for the words you used when you originally created the content.

Software isn’t smart enough to follow the way a human reads text.

The English language is extremely complicated.  There is no software that can do this correctly.

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.

It’s far easier to restructure a sentence then it is to change every word in your content.

Google Is Not As Smart As Most People Think!

In 2006, I announced the death of the link exchange.

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.

If you do a search for “Make Money Online”, you’ll find a Blogger blog at #1.

On the bottom, you’ll find people they trade links with.  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.

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.

We all give them far too much credit.

Win With Duplicate Content.

Calling what Google does a “Duplicate Content Penalty” is misleading.  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 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.

You should also build links to all of your content.  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.  By building links to them, you can outrank the original site.  This shows Google that you’re the authority.

Giving your content a thorough spinning will help, too.  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.