Promotion through articles and Google duplicate content penalty

Irrespective of the kind of site, the webmaster worries and plans on how to get more people to visit his or her site. Over the years certain ground rules have developed of which the main ones are:

Have more incoming links
Have good quality content on your site
Update your site regularly

Publishing well written articles on your own site as well as other sites helped to meet all the three criterion above. When other sites published your article, your website got a free one-way link. You had good content on your site which established you as an authority in your field. Adding new content regularly ensured that the search engine spiders regularly updated your rankings.

And then came the article directories. Now you could submit your article to a few of these article directories and interested publishers would reuse your articles on their site. Within a few days of submitting your article to major article directories, you would have tens of backlinks, if not more. Some webmasters even used your articles in their ezines giving more exposure to your article and site.

The problem with this approach has been that the author himself has got overshadowed by the big article directories. Plus add the fact these article directories are listed high on the search engines for their niche only, namely webmaster articles. So you really don't get traffic of very high quality from the directories directly. And when you search for your article on the search engines, the article directory sites will appear more prominently than yours. This is because when your article is redistributed the article directory site's link also gets propogated, thus building up the directory's reputation as well.

It has been the talk that Google penalizes duplicate content to promote high quality content on the internet. Though this has been talked about in all webmaster forums there are certain question that are unanswered:

How much is duplicate content? If I quote from another site, will it be considered duplicate?
How will Google identify duplicate content? If there is a printer friendly page for a normal html page, will these pages be considered duplicate?
Will a standard piece of code, say a newsletter subscription form appearing on every page considered duplicate?
What about open content, like lyrics and classics? Do they constitute duplicate content?
What is the penalty for duplicate content?
Does 'more' duplicate content attract more penalty?

Unfortunately no direct answers are available for such questions. But based on certain factors and assumptions we can conclude the following:
It will be most difficult for any software to identify partially duplicate content

It would be most unfair to the original author to punish him for his content being popular
It will be technically very unfeasable to identify content which can be allowed to be duplicated, like lyrics

Based on the complexities involved, it would seem that Google can at most work on an algorithm where by sites with duplicate content are not indexed for those search terms. Again duplicate content can be qualified by the term 'completely duplicate'. But this also looks far fetched.

Does Google really penalize duplicate content? We did a small experiment. Searching for 'google duplication content' on google throws up page upon page of content all displaying the same article. So it seems that Google probably does not penalize duplicate content.

But there can be no smoke without fire. How did this talk of 'duplicate content penalty' originate? The answer is not difficult to fathom. Google indexes and ranks sites based not only the content but also the relevance. This means that if more people find the article useful and the content has more backlinks, it ranks higher. Which means a site with only one article will not be as popular as another displaying this article along with hundreds of other well written targetted articles. It looks like that the site with the solo article has been penalized.

It brings us to a most important question. What should I do with the article I have? Should I allow free reprints or publish the article only on my site? Publishing the article only on one site has the advantage of uniqueness but free reprints will get you more links. More links may not necessarily mean more traffic if the sites publishing your articles are not themselves that popular.

The best way to promote your article would be to submit articles to sites that complement your sites and also publish the article on your own site. It could be even a good idea to first publish the article on your site and then after a week allow reprints on other sites. This would give a lead time for your site to get indexed by the major search engines. The key to this is to only submit your article to content sites that have regular visitors looking for information on your subject.

The other thing to do is not publish the article on your site but submit to all the article directories or atleast as many as possible. This would build up a huge number of links which could also be useful.

All said and done, it seems that original and well written content still is gold. A site with original content will always do well compared to a site with no or little original content.