Content syndication is nothing new–newspapers and magazines have been reusing other people’s quality content for a long time.

But a few years ago somebody decided that this should be open to anybody who wanted to write, and the web made it possible. Now Article Syndication is a very popular way to establish yourself as an expert on any topic, not to mention get loads of links into your website for free.

However, the problem was that search engines would rank each copy of the article exactly the same, and so the search results started showing the same results (only on different websites) when people searched.

This did not last long. Google was the first to create what is commonly called a “duplicate content filter”. This filter is responsible for recognizing two pages as being too similar and ignoring the copy while favoring the original. It worked well, and now all major search engines now employ a duplicate content filter.

This is a problem for people who are wanting to use syndicated content to generate search engine traffic to their websites. If you do nothing more than copy and paste articles from free-to-use article sites and slap them on your website, you will most surely not get any traffic from search engines because of the duplicate content filters.

But there are a few ways to beat this filter and still generate traffic from syndicated articles and other content. And there is a serious side effect of these filters that you need to be aware of. I’ll tell you about that first.

The Serious Side Effect Of Duplicate Content Filters

Ok, let’s say that you write a great article on your website topic, Green Widgets. It’s a really good article that you are proud of, so you immediately put it up on your website and then go submit it to a number of article submission sites.

Sounds great, right? You’ll get lots of links to your website for sure, and that will help you ranking. No problems then, right?

Wrong. The truth is that the major article directories are very popular, and are crawled very, very often by the search engines because of that. So it is quite likely, unless you have a very popular site yourself, that the search engines will find the article at the article directory BEFORE they find it at your site.

Are you seeing the problem yet? Because the search engine found the article at somebody else’s site first, they will consider your website’s copy the duplicate–even though you put it on your site before submitting it to those directories!

So it is very important that you make sure that your new article page is indexed in the major search engines BEFORE you submit it to the article sites.

You can verify that the page has been indexed by simply doing a search at each engine for the URL of your article. If doing a search returns your page title and a short snippet, then it’s indexed. If you get a “no matches found” type of error, then it’s not in there yet.

To ensure that your article gets indexed more quickly, get links to it from other sites. Also, have a link to your new article on your home page, and a short snippet about the article. This is good anyway since your visitors will see that you’re updating the site with new material, but it’s also good because a search engine will hit your home page more often than any other page of your site, so having a link on the home page is a great way of getting that new article noticed and indexed.