| By :
Steve Shaw
I love the wonderful questions that readers send me. Here is an excellent one about how the big search engines treat article submissions that appear on multiple websites: "If my article is republished multiple times on the internet (as I really hope it will be!), could it end up competing with itself in the Google rankings? How will duplicate content affect this situation? Will it help if I create multiple versions of the same article?" All of these are great questions - why don't we go through them one after another: 1 - Could your online article submissions "compete" with one another in the Google rankings? Every time you submit your article, there are two things that you really want to rank highly for: If you choose to focus on a long tail keyword phrase (that is a non-competitive phrase that is 3 or more words long) within the articles body copy, as is recommended, then you want a minimum of one of your articles to list really high in the search engine rankings when a reader types that same long tail phrase into Google's search window. If you are targeting your main keyword phrase in the HTML resource box, as is highly recommended, then you want your website to rank extremely highly for this particular competitive phrase. Ok so, you know you need your article to rank very highly for the long tail keyword phrase and your website to rank highly for the more popular, competitive phrase. This question that this reader has asked relates to the former scenario where someone would want a specific article to rank very highly for a long tail keyword term. Let's assume you are focusing on a long tail keyword phrase in your article copy, then it doesn't matter much that you have many versions of that very same article floating around the worldwide web. So long as a minimum of one of your articles comes up for that search term, then you've succeeded. 2 - How does duplicate content affect the situation of having articles republished on numerous websites? Now here's something you just might not have realized - duplicate content should be a part of any article marketing exercise. Think about it - you place your article on an article directory as a "free reprint article". Publishers then go to directories where they find content that they republish on their websites. If your article is valuable, then it's going to be republished. The thing to remember, republication is your goal. Might it "hurt" your website when you utilise duplicate content? No - Google does not punish authors for doing article marketing campaigns. Free reprint articles are considered as syndicated content, and syndicated content plays a vital and widely accepted role on the web. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that when readers do a search for terms connected with your articles that Google will include each and every occurence of your articles on the list. Google will likely just include a few websites that have this very article in the search engine results lists. All of the other occurrences of this article will generally be placed into Google's supplemental index. 3 - Could creating many versions of your article help? It certainly does. Every time you submit differing versions of the same article to each of the directories that you submit to, you are increasing the numbers of specific articles on the internet. Every link that is made will generally count higher because it's coming from content that is different from content found on other sites. So let's recap, these are the lessons for you to take from this article: => Article marketing really is on the up and up. This is a tool that helps your site get a higher ranking within Google. => The target with article marketing is to get your submissions republished as many times as you can. Don't be afraid to submit your content to numerous sites or to have your articles republished many times. => Writing many article variations gives you potentially much more linking power. Change the title, parts of the body copy and the resource box. Create as many quality variations as you can manage, and then submit just one variation of the article to each of the directories that you submit to.
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