Don't Worry About Duplicate Content - Everything Is Duplicate Content!

I was reading a forum post from a man who is using ArticleBuilder.net a service from Jon Leger that builds 'unique articles' from a database of snippets or tips- This is a veryeffective way of generating decent quality very readable and informative articles for people new to a topic. Ilike and use the system myself.

The poster was concerned because he had used Copyscape, a tool to detect plagiarism and content theft and it had flagged his Article Builder content as being sued elsewhere. The following is my response and explanation of what was occurring. I publish it here because I think it is of more general application to people who use and syndicate articles to market their websites and pages.

...Copyscape is a tool that is designed to be used to turn up plagiarism and copied web content. It is not designed to represent the web according to Google. Thus 'passing Copyscape' merely indicates that it is unlikely that somebody has plagiarised your work.

As far as I understand Copyscape works by taking 4 word chunks of your sample and searching across the internet for those chunks of words. At the moment it may be that they are using 3 word chunks (or shingles).
There is a HUGE difference between 3 and 4 word shingles in terms of the numbers of duplications that will turn up.

For example, I took an article produced by ArticleBuilder on Forex. I took three words 'The forex market' and whacked it into Google for exact match and came back over 68 million exact duplicates of the phrase. Indeed, it'd be very hard to write an article about Forex without those three words, in that order! Add an extra word and now we get over 18 million exact matches. Matches that'd be picked up by Copyscape. Again, how would you write about the Forex markets without using those words?

Take another, more random example: "handle your positioning" this will get you over 66,000 exact matches, many nothing to do with Forex at all. Add another word, like 'to' a very common word and we now have just over 24,000 exact matches and I can now start to see some entries from posts from Article Builder. But guess what, they are in Google's index!

The point is that it is to be expected that you will get duplication across the innerwebs. It can not be avoided.
The important thing though is that the majority of any article is unique to itself. Even if EVERY WORD appears multiple times in multiple places as long as your whole article does not then you have no problems. That is what Article Builder gives you.
Articles that do not appear anywhere else, even if bits of that article do.

But, having content like that from Article Builder is only part of the story. If you do not have links to your pages then no matter how great or unique the content is it will not be found. I absolutely know that given two pages, one with unique content and the other with syndicated content that I can outrank the unique content any day of the week just by making sure that it is well linked. I can also add an article to my sites that has been used hundreds or thousands of times and get MY version well ranked by building some backlinks.

Unique content helps newbies and those unskilled in SEM to get a little notice, but without good SEM the newbie will still fail. Link building and marketing is MUCH more important than unique content. ;)