Article Marketing Pitfalls: Four Ways To Avoid Duplicate Content

One of the most common problems with massive article marketing campaigns is trying to avoid duplicate content. Producing articles which may not be deemed as original can lead to a number of problems. It can, at worst, even lead to a plagiarism lawsuit, something no business person wants to deal with.

Part of the problem lies within the definition of "duplicate content," or rather, the lack of one. "Duplicate content," according to Google, refers to "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar."

This definition provides a general idea of what can be considered "duplicate content," particularly by Google's indexing system. However, it's vague at best, and could probably be challenged legally by a persuasive lawyer.

In truth, no comprehensive legal definition exists for the term "duplicate content." This can make it hard for a business owner (whether he writes his own articles or not) to judge whether an article might be largely duplicate content. Additionally, it's possible that one search engine may flag an article for having too much duplicate content while another doesn't.

How, then, does a business owner avoid publishing duplicate content when embarking on an article marketing campaign? (It's hard, after all, to avoid breaking a rule that isn't really a "rule.") Following these guidelines during your next article marketing campaign will help:

1) Don't use article spinners in your article marketing campaigns. Article spinners are software programs which take an original article and create "new" articles. The program "spins" them, in other words, like a spider spins a large web out of a small thread.

Article spinners can be very problematic when it comes to the "new" articles they "create." In reality, many of the "new" articles sound almost like the original. This is because most article spinners simply replace words and phrases with synonyms. The result, often, is that about half of the "spun" articles sound too much like the original not to be considered duplicate content.

2) Hire a professional writer for your article marketing campaign. Specifically, hire a writer who is familiar with search engine optimization. A majority of website owners probably wouldn't consider themselves to be writers. (Look back at your high school or college English grades if you aren't sure.)

Even if you do enjoy writing, you may not have time to write your own articles. That's okay. Hundreds of professional writers and article writing services can do it for you.

Not only can they write your material, they will be able to strategically place keywords in your articles. Those keywords are critically important to the success of your article marketing campaign.

Writers and writing services are experienced at avoiding creating duplicate content. Many article writing services actually guarantee that your articles will be free of duplicate content. You'll have no need to worry about your articles being flagged as plagiarized.

3) Give credit where credit is due. It's okay to pull information from other sources on the Internet as long as you cite them. Never copy from another source word for word unless you enclose it in quotation marks and note the original source.

It's not okay to write an article that is almost all in quotation marks (even if you cite your sources). Search engines can detect this trick. (The original writer might too and object to your liberal usage of his material.)

4) Use a content checker on all your articles in your article marketing campaign. You can use either a free, online version or purchase content-checking software. Most free, online versions can only check documents which have already been published to the Web. They can be handy for double-checking articles that you've already published.

If you want to check your article against other Web documents before you publish, you may have to spend some money. You can either purchase a duplicate content checking program, or pay for a membership to a site that does it for you.

Of course, we've already pointed out that you can also hire an article writing service to do this for you. The service will create your made-to-order articles and check them before publishing with their own software.

You can derail an article marketing campaign when you publish even a few articles with too much duplicate content. Every article that you publish could end up being filtered out by search engines if just one or two appear to be plagiarized. Instead, you'll increase your chances of article marketing success (and avoid a plagiarism lawsuit) by being careful with your published words.