How to Make your Article Marketing Campaign More Efficient

In this article I am going to discuss how you can employ some useful tools in a clever way to increase the efficiency of submitting articles and publishing content for syndication. But first we need to understand some of the popular strategies that are being used today, why article marketing works in the first place, and an important term called a "duplicate content filter."

One of the popular methods that bloggers or webmasters will use in order to get more traffic to their website is to create a detailed post about their topic or niche and then submit that same post for syndication in article directories. While syndicating content can be a good way to increase exposure and gain more incoming links, by doing this it is also possible to get slapped with a duplicate content penalty.

The duplicate content filter is something that major search engines recently introduced after the widespread use of link spamming to artificially boost search engine rankings. Link spam is where a webmaster will create numerous copies of a single web page and post them on different domain names in order to increase the number of incoming links to his website. But since this is an artificial way to get more links (as opposed to having various websites link to you on their on accord), it is considered to be a manipulation of the search engine algorithms and is frowned upon.

As soon as the major search engines like this realized that web pages that were irrelevant and filled with advertisements were gaining top rankings due to link spam, they went to work devising a filter that would block all identical pages from being listed, along with any of the pages that they link to (thereby eliminating the artificial rankings that these web pages would get).

In order for a large search engine like Google to return relevant results, they must employ a web robot to "crawl" around the internet and save a copy of every single web page that it finds. This collection of saved pages is called the 'cache,' and every time you go to a search engine and type in a keyword, it will search through the cache of stored web pages and deliver the one that is the most relevant to your search and has the most incoming links (an incoming link is considered to be a "vote" that a certain web page is good, and therefore worth linking to).

Well if the Google bot happens to come across a web page that is an identical copy of some other page, the duplicate content filter comes into play and it will make sure that only one copy of this web page is displayed on the search engine results page. But which one to choose?

The search engine is going to brand one of the web pages as the original, and then all other copies of it are going to be subsequently blocked. A few of the factors that determine which page is branded as the original are when it was created, the link strength or Pagerank of the website, and the relevancy of the domain name.

So how does this apply to your article marketing and content syndication? Well if you were to submit the same piece of content to multiple different directories and syndicated feeds, many of those pages are going to end up getting slapped by the duplicate content filter since they are basically carbon copies of each other. The ideal way to avoid this would be to create a unique piece of content to submit to every source, but that would be extremely time consuming.

The way that you can save time and also avoid the duplicate content filter is to use a tool called a "duplicate content checker." By using this kind of tool, instead of creating a new article from scratch, you can re-write small parts of your existing article and check it to make sure that it is unique enough that it will not be branded as duplicate content. This way, instead of spending 30-50 minutes coming up with a brand new article, you can spend only around 3-5 minutes by creating a slightly altered version that will not appear to be an identical copy.

By doing this you can increase the effectiveness of your article marketing and content syndication, because you can rework each article you submit in just a few minutes so that it will overcome the duplicate content filter, and more pages displaying links back to your website will rank high in the search engines.