People involved in internet marketing are still not clear about the role of duplicate content in the eyes of major search engines like Google. I have read a lot about it on internet and found people confused about this content filter issue from search engines. Most of these people are in confusion by combining two different things. I want to discuss these two parameters for webmasters.

Article writing on your own blog or site is a different from article syndication in article submission sites (article directories). Submitting your article in these directories is surely a proven way to improve search engine rankings as you get valuable back links to your website. This starts the whole discussion of duplicate content role. First question is, “should I send the same article that I have written on my blog or site to these directories with an addition of about the author section having link back to that particular page of my site?” or “I should create a separate version of the article on my blog and avoid sending the same content to article directories”. In the response of the two questions, two different theories are available.

Google web spam head Matt Cutts says “syndication of duplicate content all over the internet makes it really hard for Google to find which content is original. To solve this issue, his opinion is to include a link back to original content while distributing the content on articles directory”.

Here comes the problem, some directories or blogs do not include your link back while republishing your content as duplicate on your site. Will this be helpful for you or for him? I am of the view that he will be penalized by Google content filter and you will not having any effect on your website by search engines.

Second issue is the worth of sites to which you send your content. An example is ezinearticles.com. This directory surely has more visitors and more worth in search engines so gets crawling and indexing faster than some of the other sites. If you submit your articles to ezine articles, that will be having better rankings than your original one even though you include the backlinks to your site. So the simple solution to this is to send a different version of your site article to these article directories and include backlinks in them as well. This will definitely help your site to be safe from any penalty or loosing search engine rankings. Secondly do not over syndicate your content and ensure the submission of content to quality directories only. After all your main purpose of article syndication is gaining backlinks so why not to get these links from quality sites only? I hope this will clear the situation a lot about duplicate content role in search engine rankings.