Worried about being penalized by search engines for “content mirroring” when it comes to syndicating your articles online?

Reader [1] Asks Maya: “Finally, I have several articles written but haven’t posted them to any article directories to gain some exposure for my expertise. Is it true that your website could be labeled for content mirroring by search engines and penalized for duplicate content?”

[2] GoogleWebmasterCentral.Blogspot.com says, “Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article.”

According to Stephan Spencer over at [3] PracticalEcommerce.com, “Google’s supposed ‘duplicate content penalty’ seems to be on everybody’s minds these days.” Of course, Stephan’s post is focused on duplicate content found in many ecommerce websites but I believe his point-of-view very much relates to writers of articles.

Stephan isn’t the only one that recommends edits the copy (in his case, for products on ecommerce sites), but experts like Jeff Herring, [4] TheArticleGuy.com says “The solution is to just tweak the article on your site a bit. Change the intro or conclusion, mix around the order of the tips, add/subtract some words, etc. You want the two versions of the article to be about 20% different from each other. At the same time, don’t freak out about this, because it is only a very small portion of what google looks for. So just make sure the two articles are about 20% different and forget about it, so you can concentrate on writing, posting and marketing more articles.”

I asked [5] IdeaMarketers.com their take on this issue. Marnie Pehrson had the following response on the subject, “It’s my understanding from what I’ve read on the subject that the issue of duplicate content mainly comes into play when you have the same article on 10+ sites. The extras get dumped into Google’s supplemental index and it only looks at the ones on the most reputable sites that have had the article for the longest time. The duplicates are in essence ignored so you’re wasting your time submitting the exact same article to more than 10-12 sites (from a search engine perspective). This isn’t to say that if you have your article prominently placed on several high traffic sites that you won’t benefit from the sheer number of visitors who visit those sites and read your article. In other words, search engines aren’t the only game in town for producing traffic to one’s site. But bottom line… when we’re talking about search engines, the advice given above about making it somewhat different is good if you intend to submit the article to several article directories and have it on your site.”