One of the big cries from SEO "guru's" and Internet Marketers at the moment is about duplicate content.

"Don't use duplicate content ... you'll be penalised"

"Stop buying PLR articles, they're useless"

Well, it's all a pile of B.S. I'm pleased to tell you.

Sure the search engines are going to get fed up with "junk" sites like the plethora of adsense sites that have appeared and been sold to death. Those sort of sites the search engines will work out how to find and de-list as it reduces the whole "search engine experience".

However, websites are going to have similar or even duplicate content. It's a fact of life that the search engines can't penalise everyone for duplicate content because all the newsfeed sites would instantly be out of business.

Duplicate content is a fact of the Internet. With tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) sites, content is going to be duplicated.

There are some steps you can take to make your content more powerful and effective.

When you have articles written do the following:

a) Create a single unique article for use on your website (create multiple unique articles if you plan on using the article on more than one of your websites)

b) Create a different version of the article to submit to article directories. It can be a good idea to create a number of different versions of the same article and submit them to different directories

You can make multiple versions of the same article using software like Content Maestro (available at: ) which will help you to change the content of the article.

Some people tell you not to submit an article to multiple article directories at the same time for fear of the search engines penalising them.

However, think about this ... do the search engines crawl every article directory at exactly the same time? Does each article directory publish each article at exactly the same time?

The answer is no.

Of course they don't. Even if I submitted an article today to 200 article directories it may take the search engines a couple of months to discover the article.

You can also vary the contents of the resource box and particularly the anchor text. This again makes your content that much more unique.

All in all search engines will penalise duplicate content with the intent to shut down spammers and junk sites. If you are someone who is creating this type of site, then you can every reason to be worried.

If you are creating quality content sites and providing information for your readers then you by following the above steps you can avoid duplicate content penalities and provide your site visitors with what they are looking for.