There are rumors and speculations about getting penalized or worst getting banned from search results specifically from Google for having duplicate content in your website. Well, to tell you the truth… You will really get penalized or banned if you have the same content in more than one URL of the same domain. For example, you have an article displayed all over your site identically or 70 to 90 percent duplicated in several URLs of your site like yoursite.com/a.html, yoursite.com/b.html, yoursite.com/c.html. You might say, "who would want to do that?" but trust me there are webmaster doing that. For sure you get penalized for that!



But what we are talking here is the issue of duplicate content as a result of syndicating your content for hopes of high returns in terms of traffic that could lead to sales or conversions.

Content syndication online is in many forms, few of examples are Press Release, Article Distribution, Nationwide and Worldwide Newswires. Do you see CNN or BBC news sites got banned or penalized because of their content duplicated all over the Internet? I would really and easily say, NO! Now, the question is WHY?

The answer is really very simple. Observe the sites that display or publish the contents of CNN and BBC, for example. You can see a link pointing to BBC or CNN as the "source" of the content. Which means Google, Yahoo, Live and other SEs know it is from CNN or BBC!

I would like to quote Matt Cutts as he writes in his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/), "2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content". Now, I know Matt Cutts is blogging under his own opinions and not of his employer Google.com. However, knowing him as one of the seniors in Google, Matt really knows what he is doing.

Now, are you still afraid of syndicating your content for traffic? Now that you know what is best?

Obviously, content syndication especially article distribution is the most powerful methods of SEO and traffic generation. And the most affordable too with sites like iSnare.com, ThePhantomWriters.com, SubmitYourArticle.com around.

Understanding duplicate content is as important as it can be for every website publisher. If you as a publisher just know that it can lead you to disaster but does not know that there are good exceptions, might just make you loose your chance of taking advantage of a powerful means of online promotion, Article Marketing!

I will not talk about Article Marketing in here but I am writing this article especially for content syndicators or otherwise known widely as "article marketers".

I hope this article will clear up a few troubled minds that make us afraid to distribute articles.

Again, there is no harm in distributing articles. As long as you make sure you include a link back to your site and your page where your article is published in your site, you'll be fine.