Are you afraid of duplicate content?

The question of duplicate content is botherning minds of many affiliates especially those who promote sites via article marketing.

And the main question asked is "Should I rewrite article for every new article directory I distribute to?" We know of some horrible duplicate content filter that can throw your site away from SERPs for indefinite time... So what is the right answer - to use duplicate content or not to use it in our article marketing?

I have answered this question for myself a long time ago and I cannot tell I regret of my actions :)

But instead of long discussions I love precise experiments. And here's what I found recently on the subject.

Evidence

First, go to Google and type in how does real estate investing works. On 04.09.2007 I've seen such results.



What we see here are two articles from ezinearticles.com, ezinearticles.com/?How-Does-Real-Estate-Investing-Work&id=452125 is #2 and ezinearticles.com/?How-Does-Real-Estate-Investing-Work?&id=678585 is #3

I'm interested in this article, note author's name and first paragraph.



But if we look further, we can see another article that is also in Google's top 10, with exactly the same title Real Estate :: How Does Real Estate Investing Work?
This article is hosted in ArticleBiz.com directory (www.articlebiz.com/article/82964-1-how-does-real-estate-investing-work/ - ) and is #5 in Google for our keywords. Nice, we see 3 different articles with the same title that have top positions in Google.

But are those articles different? ;)

Well, here's where the show begins! Remember my last picture? OK, let's open ArticleBiz.com article and see it:



We can see the same author and first paragraph looks like the same as first paragraph of ezinearticles.com article.

I decided to check how unique are these two articles and typed www.dupecop.com - service that allows to check uniqueness of 2 different pieces of text. I inserted article from ezinearticles directory and article from ArticleBiz directory. Here's the result:



Both articles are identical.

And the show is not over yet. If we take a look at these two sites in top 6 - www.dealfiles.com and www.transformit.net, we find that www.dealfiles.com belongs to the author of ezinearticles.com/?How-Does-Real-Estate-Investing-Work&id=452125, and www.transformit.net belongs to Nancy Spivey, author of our duplicate articles =)))

Both articles and the site are feeling great in top Google results! I could say - "Use it to your advantage", ...but the show is not over yet!

Finally, I took a look into that site that held top positions thanks to successful article "trick", and found guess what? -



I checked article from the site and articles from both directories and found they all were all identical.



Conclusion

As you see, this is not guessings but real situation. Duplicate content not only works, but helps the main site reach SERPs. It's up to you to decide how to use this situation ;) What do you think?