Similarly those webmasters who obtain content from article submission sites are doing themselves a disservice if they don't follow the publisher rules laid down: the article must be copied in its entirety without any changes; all links must remain intact; the authors' information must be displayed without change; and the article submission sites' link must remain. If these guidelines are adhered to, then the person copying the original content will not experience any search engine duplicate content penalties.

However if the publisher guidelines are ignored and, for example, the authors' information or the article submission sites' links are omitted, then the search engines will penalize not only the respective page but the whole site. This is because the search engines will conclude that the whole of the site is engaged in using duplicate content.

This basic rule to avoid duplicate content penalties, however, does not apply to content taken directly from a web site. If someone copied the text from one of my web sites and put it on their own site, then that is stolen duplicate content Attributing the article to my site will not allow the thief to avoid penalties in the way that an attributed article from Reuters or AAP will.

Summing up then, copying an article from a recognized news source or from an article submission site will not incur the wrath of search engines providing the article is attributed to its original source. Failure to do so could result in a site being banned by the search engines, with Google being particularly harsh.

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