Seems a bit odd when you consider how many sites syndicate content these days, from the BBC and CNN to ma and pa sites, everyone’s getting their content out there as much as possible.

Ezine articles wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t hordes of webmasters all wanting to take the duplicate content and publish it!

So, will duplicate content really get you penalized? Who should we ask? There are any number of self-proclaimed experts hanging out a various webmaster and internet marketing forums. Just spend more than a day at any one of them and watch the same discussion take place many times.

We can’t ask them, so who do we ask?

How about Google?

Here’s what I read from Google

The most important things to know about duplicate content are:

• Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

If you’d like to read Google’s full post you can do so here.

So, does this mean it’s safe to just put up any old scraped content then? Well, no not really. You still need good content and their own advice makes it clear that unique content is always likely to do better than duplicate content, so it’s worth the effort to be unique. You just don’t have to spend sleepless nights that you’ll disappear from the search engine if you have some content that also exists elsewhere.

Of course, if your whole site is nothing but scraped content you might still have problems, but that’s a whole other post.

Related posts:

1. Use Your Blog Content In Multiple Places
2. PLR Content
3. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 10

It does require that you have an existing website somewhere, as you’ll see. But it’s real easy to do.

You have to have an Adsense account. And as you may know, you need a website up and running before you can sign up for Adsense so you do need a little preparation to make the most of this. But many of you will already have an Adsense account. If you don’t you can set up a free blog at Blogger or WordPress and tie your Adsense account to that. Make a few posts and then apply and you should get approved pretty fast.

One you’ve got an Adsense account you can put the ads on any website you like. Just copy the code into one or more of the pages.

Now here’s the good part. If you put an Adsense code block on one of the pages on your new site Google won’t know what kind of ad to provide. That’s because it’s never heard of that site and has no information.

But if you keep refreshing the page, all of a sudden the ads will become relevant. Which means that Google now knows about your site. And while you won’t appear in the index the same day at least Google now knows your site is there and you will get indexed faster.

Of course it also makes sense to do your other SEO tasks, like getting links in quality directories, maybe adding a few comments to popular blogs.

But Adsense will wake up big G. and make them take notice of you. So use their own tools for your benefit!

Oh, you might find you need to refresh the page quite a bit before you start seeing proper Adsense ads. Once you see them you can relax. And if you want to take the ads off at that point you can.

Related posts:

1. Quick Thank You
2. Google Site Maps
3. Looking to make money from Adsense?

And that, which increases traffic, means more money in the bank.

Producing a site map can be done by hand – if you have the time. Or you can use one of the many tools available. Some are paid and some are free. I discovered a very flexible free one today and wanted to share it with you here.

Visit GSiteCrawler here.

You’ll see it’s a free download, but the author gives you the opportunity to make a donation. If you use it wisely this little program should result in more visitors to your site. With the extra money you make, why not send him a small donation?

Related posts:

1. Google neglecting your site? Add a blog.
2. Do Google obey TOS?
3. Link Cloaking