One of the most popular, inexpensive ways to market your business online in recent years is article marketing: writing quality articles and submitting them to dozens of article directories, where they (hopefully!) get picked up and published in relevant ezines and websites. This, of course results in potentially hundreds of copies of essentially the same content — your article — on various web pages across the Internet.

So — is this the dreaded “duplicate content” that Google and other search engines will penalize in their rankings? I’ve heard a lot of chatter this week that this is indeed the case, and so article marketing will start losing it’s effectiveness — or will it? The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth, by white hat search engine optimization expert Jill Whalen, offers a clear explanation of what is, and isn’t, considered duplicate content. If you have any doubts about the future of article marketing, this post may put them to rest.