Article Marketing Strategies and Duplicate Content Filters

How Article Marketing Strategies Must Change to Meet the Challenge of Duplicate Content Filters

What is the best article marketing strategy? Should
you submit your articles to just one article directory,
several, or hundreds of directories?

Traditionally, if one can use that word in connection
with the Internet, the strategy of article marketers
was to take an article they had written and submit it
to as many article directories as possible. This resulted
in their article appearing on perhaps hundreds of web
sites across the Internet, each article carrying links
back to their site from its resource box. This was before
the days of duplicate content filters at the search engines.

Interested webmasters who saw the article marketer’s
articles at one of these sites would then re-publish
the article on their own web sites, so creating yet
more copies of the article and links back to the article
marketer’s web site.

This was an incredibly valuable article marketing strategy
for the marketer, however things changed somewhat with
the implementation of duplicate content filters at the
search engines. Duplicate content filters find wording
on web pages that also appear, in an identical form,
on other web pages. They then demote the value of such
pages in the search engine results pages.

Where does this leave the article marketer’s strategies?
Pages with duplicate content will not receive the number
of visitors that pages with unique content will, resulting
in Internet users clicking on the links in the resource
box less frequently.

One strategy to work around this that webmasters use is to submit different versions of the same article to different article directories. In some ways this goes against the grain for me, as I have to ask ‘Are they adding anything new to the web?’ Of course they are in robot/search engine terms, but I mean in human terms.

What these webmasters do: provided the different versions of the articles they use are sufficiently different this results in ‘unique content’ (in search engine terms) at the article directories submitted to.

The more different the article the better the results, however. Add to this my concerns about adding to the human experience on the web, and what I prefer to do is to write what becomes a new article entirely by writing again from a different slant or perspective, and so bringing in new ideas and a different understanding of the topic concerned.

This article marketing strategy enables me to cover
some of the original material again, but as I am writing
from a different viewpoint I am saying different things
about it. For example, were I to rewrite this article
from a different viewpoint I might choose to focus my
new article upon duplicate content penalties at the
search engines, covering not only the effects of these
upon article marketers, but also upon Internet marketering
in general.

This might mean I would need to do some more research
about duplicate content filters, so that I could begin
the new article marketing strategy piece with some more
facts about duplicate content filters before moving
on to look at how these filters affect web site marketing.

This new research might, in its turn, lead me on to
write a further article about duplicate content filters
from a different point of view, perhaps about how they
had improved the search engine results pages, or how
they had affected news and current affairs web sites,
that use a lot of syndicated content.

This strategy is, I believe, by far the best way to
generate new articles, although there do exist short-cuts
that some people take.

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