For a while, online communities debate on the lost effectiveness of article marketing and syndication. Fingers point at the duplicate content penalty supposedly imposed by Google.
Recently, Matt Cutts, the software engineer of Google, actually said that your site will not be penalised so long as the syndicated articles link back to the source site. This means that article marketing as a strategy is still sound if article directories include a resource box with a link back to your site.
Getting the word out that you are an expert in your niche topic to as many sites as possible makes sense for traffic generation. On the web, it’s about numbers. You want to increase your web presence so that potential readers and subscribers can track you and your site down.
Therefore, what are the ways to avoid duplicate content penalty, so that you still derive the benefits from article marketing?
1. Never allow anyone to publish an article without including your author resource box with an active hyperlink back to your site.
2. You may want to publish the original content on your site first before syndicating it.
3. Make the original content on your site different by having a unique article title and modifying some parts. These parts should best include the intro and conclusion.
4. If your web stats show that a particular article directory is driving more traffic to your site, you may want to consider creating another unique version just for publishing on this directory.
5. Publish some new information on your site that is unique. Instead of keyword optimised articles that you usually use for article marketing, you can also publish product reviews, videos, interesting finds and links. Mix your content up!