“Penalty” would be the wrong word to use. I didn’t mean to imply that syndicating an article from your website would cause Google to remove you from their index or anything like that. Google comes out and says there isn’t a duplicate content penalty (unless of course you’re just scraping content from other sites and republishing it without any additional value – then there are related penalties).

I do agree with what Matt Cutts said about duplicate content: don’t over-syndicate and if you do syndicate articles that are on your site, have a link to your original content.

To re-word what I said, if you are going to syndicate articles on your website, make sure you have unique keyword-rich content as well that isn’t found on other websites.

Thanks Eric for your comments as well.

Ty

For your readers, I wanted to touch on some of the things mentioned in the comments.

With SEO, there should never be any associated (or eluded to) voodo and monkey dust. If you come across a company or consultant that exudes this stench… BAIL!

SEO done the right way is VERY involved, but has the potential to increase your traffic and earnings significantly. And when done right, your site has a fantastic chance to sustain long-term higher rankings in the search engines even when they do significant algo-updates.

With regard to duplicate content and article submission (for links), Klint is dead on. I would like to add, however, that I have had success hosting articles on my own domain names and have seen a greater benefit from doing so (multiple links from multiple domains pointing straight to my domain name = better link graph). If you want to do this, don’t use a directory named articles. Assume that “articles” triggers a flag, at this point. Try hosting your articles under Resources or something similar. (:

More on links and link-getting… I know you’ve heard the old saying, “He with the most links wins,” but that is NOT always true. I currently work for a company (6.5 years) and we have half the number of backlinks that some of our competitors have and we KILL THEM in the organic rankings. We do this by building better content–stuff that actually HELPS PEOPLE make a more informed decision or increase their own knowledge. For this, we get more quality links. It’s all about building trust and fulfilling promises to deliver something.

My point in telling you this is to make sure that you do not focus solely on the on-page factors; things like title tag, meta description, keyword frequency, intra-site linking, use of no-follow, etc. Off-site optimization and marketing is HUGE.

And with regard to telling the search engines which directories/files they are “allowed’ to access on your domain name, use a robots.txt file to exclude any you do not want them to crawl. You can even use meta tag on the pages themselves (i.e. no-index , no-follow) to compliment your exclusion efforts. Still not always 100% effective, but it definitely helps.

Thanks for this no BS view – as usual hard work is needed to succeed. I have some questions in my mind about what kinds of content are visible to the search engines. Clearly, copy, tags, titles and headers are visible, but what about pdf files, passworded pages, stuff in databases which gets served up to viewers ? I\’m especially interested in the membership site situation and I need to decide whether to use the \"More\" tag or perhaps where to place it!

Is there a definitive list of what the search engines can and can\’t get at ?

BWs
James

“I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.”

I think Google is very logical when you look at what it does from its point of view of helping its users find the best matches to their search.

I can’t prove direct cause and effect, just when I made this input I got that output – don’t ask me about the transformation.

You are such a generous guy to keep sending us all of the priceless information! Thanks so much for this “valentine’s day” present.

- Dave P.