Duplicate Content and Article Marketing

Articles written for internet distribution are meant to be duplicated. Otherwise, what is the purpose of article marketing if not to circulate your work and get known as a writer with some knowledge of certain subjects?

The dilemma begins with the ways content is duplicated. For example, there is nothing wrong with email unless it is tagged as spam. The same goes for articles intended to be duplicated for circulation and not to become what Google technology considers as duplicate content. So let s start with how Google looks at duplicate content.
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it's unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and -- worse yet -- linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.
The emphasis of technology like Latent Semantic Analysis to determine letter, word, sentence, paragraph and contextual relations across domains may influence the technical interpretation of duplicate content but it falls short in weighing the importance of circulation to authors who seek recognition through article marketing, a technique used to get their work read.

In many cases, the discussion of duplicate content revolves around how Google states or implies its management of economic relations between advertiser and publisher. The real value, or cultural importance of technology in determining duplication, hinges on how it also relates to the importance of duplication for circulating the work of authors using legitimate ways of article marketing. Writers who want their work duplicated for circulation on the web must consider the origin or source of their work and the history of subsequent owners or chain of custody. There are varieties of ways to establish this type of provenance for article marketing. Copyright is literally the rights to copy an original creation. This means that the time and date of release into the public domain establishes the first opportunity of rights to copy. So for example if you post an article first to your own blog then you can prove ownership of the original  and subsequent web syndication makes your article available for other sites to use. Regardless of the copyright terms of any article distribution service, websites that choose to publish your work, or other chain of custody, another important part of provenance is a resource box has a link back to your original work. The time, date, and location of your original article will establish proof of ownership, rights to duplicate content through web syndication, and a marker for Google to determine provenance. Although writers do not always start out to become webmasters, or vice versa, the two are skills are essential in the development, distribution, and provenance of web content. Today blogs are freely available and getting easier to set up and manage. Furthermore, web growth continues to create demand for original content exponentially greater than what web content writers are able to supply. Therefore duplicate content derived from article marketing is an important business building activity. As the gap between supply and demand for original content grows, technical solutions like article spinning and web scraping become more sophisticated to fill the gap. The down side of technical supply can appear as plagiarism, lost congruity, or just plain nonsense. Therefore, authors must rely on Google technology to distinguish the difference between duplicate content with and without provenance. Unfortunately, there are no clear indicators that reward content writers for their article marketing efforts. Instead, there is plenty of discussion around duplicate content penalties without weighing in the importance of provenance and originality. While blogs can serve as both proof of ownership and offer distribution through channels of social networking, the scale of duplication is significantly smaller than overall web opportunity approached with article marketing. Subsequently article directories and directory submission services emerge to appear as the only credible means of large-scale duplication, circulation, syndication and article marketing.

The work I do as both writer and webmaster at info-publishing.biz is to develop ways to interface technology and culture. Technically, info-publishing.biz integrates article directories, blogs, and an ecommerce site so subscribers and ARC members can Write to Prosper using controlled means of article marketing.