I run a couple of niche blogs. They’re MFA‘s. Most of the time I use articles from article directories like EzineArticles or Go Articles as content fillers when I hit a blank wall for topics. The contents from these article directories (with link backs, of course) has yielded positive results so far. I was thinking it’s better to have something fresh to publish than nothing at all.
But, up to this day, the duplicate content penalty that search engines warns about is still not clear to me. Blaming myself partly for not reading popular webmaster’s forum like Digital Point or WebmasterWorld as I’m not a big fan of forums.
So, is it just a myth or there are really penalties for having duplicate content? From my previous project maintaining pretty popular co-op blogging site (Alexa 4K), my boss was very worried his bloggers was copying content from everywhere I had to code a parser to check for duplicate contents.
If duplicate content are being punished, are popular article directories spared from duplicate content penalties? I tried searching for a couple niche topics and I found the top directories having the same content from the same author dominating the SERPs.