Often, I find that online marketers are too caught up with duplicate content that they forget what matters the most - they are in article marketing to build high quality back links. They keep forgetting that as long as they write useful and valuable content for their sites and continue to build relevant back links, their sites will rank well. Instead, they keep focusing on duplicate content. And I'm starting to observe a rising trend where article marketers spend more and more time writing for the search engines.

You have to remember how duplicate content comes about. It all starts from the search engines. You see, the primary function of a search engine is to help the user find the most relevant content in the shortest possible time. And it has to fill this function while providing a positive user experience.

So that means a search engine cannot possibly list thousands of web pages that are essentially similar when a user performs a search. Who wants to use a search engine that lists thousands and thousands of duplicated pages in a single search!? But recognize that this is a problem that the search engines have to solve.

As article marketers, you do not run the search engines. So it is not necessary for you to be overly obsessed with duplicate content. Let the search engines figure out how to solve that problem. Your job, and primary focus, is to develop unique content for your own site, and build relevant back links to your pages. This is very important, so I don't mind repeating it again and again.

When I say overly obsessed, I mean article marketers are spending way too much time trying to submit unique content to the search engines. For example, one common way to do so is to submit macro articles.

Macro articles contain several phrases for each sentence that have the same meaning. A special tool or software is then used to spin the article to generate different versions of the same article. Hence, the article marketer can now distribute so-called unique articles to different news sources or article directories.

But unlike ordinary articles, which take somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes to write, a macro article can take up to a couple of hours to complete. This is taking way too long to achieve the same thing - building back links.

Although it is possible using the article distribution service that I provide to spin and submit macro articles, I usually advise marketers not to get too caught up with this duplicate content issue. If you do, you will find that you are spending a lot of time working on the macro articles. This is time that can be spent elsewhere on more important things - like product development.

When the search engines find many pages of largely similar content, what they will do is to choose one to rank well. Again, remember that they do this to make their search results look good. That doesn't mean they discount all the back links you have built by submitting the same article to several hundred article directories.

I know this for a fact because we have a custom made link popularity tool to track the link counts from all the major search engines. And even when we submit the articles to the online news sources, online magazines, ezines, and so on, the link counts have continued to climb. And so have our rankings. And I continue to observe the same results that our clients have been getting.

So which would you rather prefer? Spending two hours to build a hundred back links or spending fifteen minutes to build the same number of back links? Both will result in higher rankings for your site. The answer is obvious.

Initially, article marketers submit the same article to all the article directories to build links. As duplicate content gets a lot of attention, especially from major webmaster news sources, the good old way of article marketing is fast fading away.

Now, the new generation of article marketers ask for more sophisticated features like macro articles. They think that macro articles can help them rank better than their competitors.

But eventually, they will come to realize that they are in fact, getting the same results. And when they do, they will go back to creating one useful article at a time, and submitting that same article to all the article directories. They have ran a full circle, and finally got back to where they started.