If you are writing articles for the purpose of off page SEO it is time to consider just how swiftly Googles algorithm is changing over a short period off time. We don't need to concern ourselves too much with the other search engines at this time. You will have heard many times that unique content is King, and it still is, but you must also consider that contextual relevance is now Queen.

The whole way of thinking behind article content is being changed. Semantics, overall page theme, phrase matching, (comparisons with millions of other similar pages in their index to see if phrases are relevant to the topic / theme), and even the use of buzz or niche words - eg woodworkers, surfers, stamp collectors or whatever all have their own specialised words and phrases which would mean nothing to the rest of us. This is just a part of what Google will use to determine how important and relevant your article actually is to them.

This ongoing war between the guys who find a chink in Googles armour and then write software to exploit it will never stop. This is human nature. The thing is that these guys pushing their "latest, most powerful" scripts and PC applications have a good job for life. There are always millions of people who are quick enough to snap up their $97 products if there is a hint they can get to #1 without doing any work.

They have customers for life. As soon as Google addresses an issue then another script is on the market and so the loop continues. The sad thing is that the buyers of these scripts are spending so much time trying to be "smart" they probably never actually build a business.

A similar problem exists with the use of Private Label Rights articles. There is little wrong in principal with using PLR properly, they can give you some great ideas to get started, but the vast majority of users who have downloaded 1000 articles either free or for next to no cost simply load them up and fire them out onto the Net without even looking at them! This, together with spinning software is the cause for the incredible amount of useless and senseless junk on the Internet that Google is determined to deal with. And rightly so.

There is no doubt that the duplicate content issue is presently a huge cause for concern for Google. We all know that there was never any penalty imposed by Google for Duplicates. They simply ignored them. Weight being given to the oldest most relevant content.

It is unlikely that we shall see any penalty against duplicate content as it is quite reasonable to expect more than one version of an article on different websites. What we may see is penalties against what Google determines to be spun, low quality content with no relevance. I will not speculate on these penalties but we may have an issue on exactly what is determined to be sub standard content.

It would seem that the days of us "leading" Google into what our content is all about through the use of titles, keyword density, file names and so on is coming to end. Once the programming is in place it may well be that all we have to do is to write naturally with a certain amount of passion about a theme we have an interest in or have researched well. MMmmmm! Didn't we use to do this before search engines and algorithms and programmers came on the scene?