Affiliate Marketing 101

In this post, I want to address a certain piece of misinformation that is being spread widely among Internet marketers. Part of the blame for this misinformation falls to article spinning programs and the way they are being advertised.

What I am talking about is the so-called “duplicate content penalty”. Apparently, Google has some kind of an issue with copies of the same content when it finds them spread across several websites or on several pages of a single website. As the rumor goals, if the Google crawlers find this duplicate-content this will trigger some kind of a penalty. On a Side-Note, while I have seen dozens of mentions of the duplicate-content-penalty, I have yet to encounter a description of exact details, explaining what this penalty is and who it is that gets punished.

Of course, it’s all just a myth. And it’s very easy to find proof against it. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Press Releases:

Any time something important happens and the press release is published, the story gets republished by many news sites, large and small. Typically, the same news item will also be picked up by many related blogs. In most cases, some or all of the original text of the initial press release is republished. Despite this, you don’t see news sites and news blogs getting punished by anyone.

Song Lyrics:

Have you ever seen how many websites there are, where people can look up lyrics to their favourite songs? And can you imagine how often pieces of famous song-texts are quoted and reproduced on blogs and in discussion forums on the topic of music? In every instance, the song-texts are unchanged and identical, in other words: duplicates. And once again, it’s clear to see that no penalty applies to sites like lyrics databases.

Practically Anything That Goes “Viral”:

Time and time again, some piece of content (perhaps a video or a joke) catches on with a wide audience and start spreading across the web like wildfire.  When something goes viral like this, it gets republished and copied hundreds and thousands of times on many different sites. Clearly, this is a perfect example of duplicate content, but no penalties apply to sites that republish memes and viral content.

Despite this evidence, the myths about the duplicate content penalty are alive and well, and it might be due to a mis-interpretation of the Google search results.

A Misunderstanding:

If you search for a piece of content that has numerous duplicates, Google will only display a few of those in the standard search results. However, you can select an option in order to see all of the duplicates listed. The reason for the omission of some duplicates from the search results is that Google strives to display diverse and relevant results. Displaying dozens or hundreds of duplicate entries would not be very useful for the person doing the search. However, the sites that are not being listed are still indexed by Google and links from those sites still “count”, so there is no actual penalty in play.

Of course, because fear sells, many article spinning programs make use of this myth in their sales process, trying to make you believe that you will get punished if you don’t rewrite your content before distributing it.

Article spinning and tools and programs that help you do it does have it’s purposes and it can be very beneficial for online marketing. But a mythical penalty from Google has nothing to do with it.