The secret to article marketing is not really a secret at all. May gurus and would be writers and bloggers would have you believe that the quickest and easiest way to create articles is to either buy resale / reprint rights to articles already written or to hire someone else to do it for you.

When first presented with these ideas it sounds like an easy way to get internet marketing articles listed for your websites or blogs. But how can you push your web site or blog to the top of search engine rankings when hundreds if not thousands of users are using the same articles as you?

The answer is simple: use methods that others don’t know about or will not take the time to use, such as writing and publishing you own articles. This will also help prevent what is known as duplicate content.

Duplicate content is the biggest killer for internet marketing articles and is clearly listed as such in the webmaster guidelines for search engines such as Google.

Let me explain the duplicate content issue more clearly for you.

Google and many of the other search engines have some very sophisticated scripts running their search engines that can determine very quickly if you have duplicate content on your site. In doing so they may not always punish you for having duplicate content but they will definitely drop that article from their search engine listings, which completely defeats the purpose of the article in the first place, which is to help your website or blog to gain rankings.

Search engines such as Google realize that having duplicate content on your website or blog is not always going to be your fault since many webmasters may republish articles on their own sites to maintain a depth in the content they deliver to their visitors. In turn this means that it is literally unavoidable to have identical content showing up on several sites, but as I mentioned earlier this in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of their webmaster guidelines. It simply means that search engines like Google will take more time to further processes the content to find the original source of the content. In most cases where the original content is published can be quickly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.

So how does that affect you when you go and publish your article to numerous websites and blogs without changing the content within the article?

First off it means that really only the first place that you publish your article will have any chance of gaining any sort of ranking from the search engines such as Google. Second it means that if your article is being dropped from the search engine listings, unless you are publishing your articles to websites and blogs that already have a high traffic flow through, the article may never be seen by anyone, once again this renders your article useless.

So the bottom line here is to make sure that you are publishing your articles to a well respected and high traffic websites or blogs in the first place, helping to ensure that your articles are doing the job that you really want it to do, which is to help you gain more traffic and exposure for your business.

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