Some SEO Basic Tips - Article Submission

This may very well be one of the hottest debated topics when it comes to SEO, or search engine optimization. Not whether or not you submit articles to directories in order to get inbound links to your site. Everybody agrees that this is one of the most important things to do. What people can't seem to agree on is the duplicate content penalty. Some say that it is quite real and others say that it is just a load of horse manure. Well, this article is going to explore by sides of the argument but will ultimately leave it up to you to decide who you think is right.

First let's discuss exactly what we mean by duplicate content penalty. Let's say you wrote an article on acne cures and you submitted that article to E-Zine Articles. You then took that same article and submitted it to Go Articles. And you kept on doing this, submitting that same article to different article directories in order to maximize your web site's exposure. What you end up having is what they call duplicate content. The same article is located in more than one place. The question is, is there a penalty for this content, as some people claim, or is it really just a scare tactic? We're going to present both sides of the argument.

Those who say that there is a duplicate content penalty for doing this insist that the search engines look to see that the same article is on more than one web site and because it is the same article, they will either not list it in their search engine directory for all sites, or, if they do, they will penalize the site that the article is pointing to by dropping them in the search engine ranks. This is what is referred to as duplicate content penalty and those who swear by it insist that it is very real.

Those who say that there is no duplicate content penalty offer this as their argument. Because the article directories are there for other people to read these articles and even put them on their own web sites, even if you were to submit your site to just one article directory, eventually, that article would be on a number of other sites. If the duplicate content penalty did indeed exist, then even just submitting to one article directory would bring about this penalty when other sites started posting the same article. Plus, they say that by having your article at more places, you get more real people to see your site, so the penalty doesn't matter, if it even exists. You have to admit, it's an interesting argument.

This leaves us with an interesting dilemma. Certainly there is validity to both sides of the argument, and since nobody but the search engines really know for certain, what do you do? Well, this is what I do. Figuring that if there really is a duplicate content penalty, I want to minimize my chances of having it happen to me. So I only submit to one article directory. If other sites pick the article up and I get penalized, well, at least I tried.

Am I right? Who knows? Maybe someday I'll throw caution to the wind and submit my one article to a hundred directories.

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