There is currently much talk on forums and web logs around the internet that article sites are being hit with ‘duplicate content penalties', which is applied by major search engines such as Google when the content on one site is found to be very similar, if not identical, to that of another site. There is some truth in this, as the rapid expansion of article sites as lead to search results becoming filled with content from such sources. Of course, the strongest article sites are very powerful in their own right and their content is typically original, and of interest to a vast array of people. Google frowns upon individual pages which appear on the internet that are simply duplicating the information provided on another site, and the ‘penalty' incurred means that Google will drop the ranking a few notches, or in bad cases, simply remove the site from its indexing, which means it will not appear on any of its results pages.

If a person wants to search for a particular product/topic, and the results page shows up with hundreds of pages which each show the same/too similar information, then that person will not have experienced a good search. Google, rather than penalising duplicate content (as in many cases it cannot be helped), rather acts a filter, to ensure that a person's search yields worthwhile results. Just because your site does not appear in the result does not mean that you have been hit with a Google ‘penalty', merely that there are stronger, more authoritative sites that Google has picked which hold the same/similar information. Put more simply, the whole idea of Google when it was started was to make searches more relevant, rather than simply relying on the number of times the keyword(s) were repeated on a page. Therefore, it will only show up a diverse cross section of possible matches, rather than a list of sites all offering the same basic content.

In truth, Google has made it harder for weaker, newer sites to perform well, and this is across the board, not just with article sites. Some authors will only submit their content to established sites, which leaves the new and less well known sites struggling for good content. However, all article sites started somewhere, so new sites must make sure they are doing the basics right and laying the foundations, by subscribing to web directories such as Yahoo and Dmoz, and taking the time to promote themselves through forums and blogs, if they cannot yet attract the top authors. The material they do post has to legitimate, so as not to tarnish their reputation before they have really begun. This means checking over all of the material submitted to them, to make sure the content is both appropriate and relevant, and doing a bit of background research on the author, to determine whether they are genuine writers, or simply plagiarisers who have done no more than copy and past another person's article and then cite it as their own work.
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