Let me ask you a question:

If you pick up an article from an article directory and post it on your site, will your page/site be penalised?

From what I have read on forums and in emails recently, a lot of people think they will be penalised for using these articles. My own opinion on this is no, it wont get your page or site penalised.

The topic of duplicate content is often hotly debated on forums, and to be honest, I don't know where all the misinformation is coming from. People use the term "duplicate content filter" without applying any common sense to the situation.

As with anything related to SEO, the internet provides you with a laboratory to test your theories.

Let me describe a couple of my tests.

One of my articles was published on my own site. Google indexed the article, and my site was the only place with that article. Searching for the title, I was the only site listed in Google. I then submitted that article to ezinearticles.com. I waited for Google to find it, and then searched for my title again. Guess what? EzineArticles.com was listed as #1 and my site as #2. Even though Google knew the article originated from my site and therefore ezinearticles had "copied" it. Google still ranked the ezinearticles duplicate ahead of mine. If there is a duplicate content filter then it certainly did not apply to ezinearticles in this instance.

Not convinced?

I wrote an article some time ago and submitted it to several article directories. The title of the article was:

"How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic"

Go to Google and search for it. Put the title inside quotations so that you only find pages with that exact phrase in them.

I currently get over 17,000 results returned for that article. Look at each of the first 10 results. When I did it, all 10 were my article.

You can continue onto page 2 and check those results.

Surely if there was a duplicate content filter in place that penalised duplication of articles across web sites, we would not see this reprinting of my article across all these sites?

Using articles from article directory sites will not get your page penalised for duplicate content.

Where duplicate content will hurt you, is when you republish the same article (or parts of an article) on your site, several times (even if you change the main keyword running through the article). This penalty may also cause you problems if you publish the same article across multiple sites that you own (yes, Google knows which sites belong to the same webmaster).

Advice: If you make every page on every one of your sites unique, the duplicate content filters are not going to cause you problems.

What does the future hold? Well, it seems Microsoft are developing an algorithm to check for duplication of phrases within pages. This algorithm will find articles built around the same core phrases. Duplicate content filters are certainly getting smarter, so why not future-proof your sites now by adding unique, valuable content. It may take longer, but it will last longer too.

Andy Williams offers a variety of free reports related to internet marketing and a weekly newsletter.