Whether or not the "duplicate content penalty" even exists has been a hot topic in forums. And if it is a fact, then how do you get around it? Well, no more sitting on the fence, I'm jumping into the discussion now. Everyone else has offered their opinion and now it's time to make mine public.

Deny the existence of the "duplicate content penalty" at your own peril. Prove it to yourself with this simple test. You'll need to get one of your articles published on 300 or more sites so submit a good article to enough publishers to accomplish that first. About three weeks later, do a search on the title of the article in Google. You should see about 300 results. Now monitor those search results for another three weeks. For some reason, the results will shrink to a paltry 16 links? You'll see a message like this at the bottom of the page:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 16 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." This is the infamous "duplicate result penalty".

It's easy to determine the cause of the problem is submitting "duplicate" articles repeatedly. It might be better called the "similar results omission" but whatever you call it, it's not good." Interestingly, Google has not perfected their technique otherwise you would see only one result instead of 16.

The devastating end result of the "duplicate content penalty" is that the search results and the links you get from article submissions are reduced by 18.75 times. Unfortunately, the means you must submit 18.75 times more articles to achieve the same results from article marketing that you did just a few years ago. There are two solutions. The first solution involves spending the time and effort required to submit a different article to each site. The simpler and easier solution is to use a tool like ArticleROI which does most of the work for you.

If you do either of the above, you can retain all 300 of those articles in the Google results. The math works out to improving your results by 18.75 times with the same amount of effort. The article marketing tool I use to acheive these greater results is ArticleROI.