In the last article entitled "Teaching Your Way to the Top With Articles," we discussed how the gurus and other clever marketers figured out that being a teacher was more profitable than being a marketer. They created a "pied piper" effect that had thousands of people waiting for their next words to come out in print so they could follow.

They made millions!

But not all the information was all that good, and a lot of people got taken for a ride due to partial techniques and funneling tactics that basically made more money for the teacher and nothing for the "students." Yes, there was a "dark side" to marketers becoming teachers and gurus.

Well this all happened again recently when something Google had in its guidelines got misconstrued, and whether intentionally or not, the effect was astronomical.

In the Google guidelines it mentions duplicate content and how its a bad thing. However, when you read the document completely, it explains what duplicate content actually is to them. According to Google, duplicate content is plastering the same content on the same site to try and fool the search engines into thinking a site has much greater relevancy than it actually does.

In other words, it would equate to reposting this article over and over again on this blog with little or nothing else on the blog so as to make it look like it was one huge case study involving article marketing.

That's all Google or any other search engine say about duplicate content. No posting the same content on the same site over and over again. Period!

Now recently one resident Google expert mentioned taking care not to use an article already posted on your site for the purposes of submitting it to the article directories. But that's just common sense, because most article directories have a higher page rank than the average site, so posting the same content to them as you'd have on your own site would be shooting yourself in the foot. You would in effect be "withdrawing" any weight your article may have and giving it to the article directories.

But that's an entirely different matter than the duplicate content issue causing all the fuss . . .

The big misconception caused by taking Google's words out of context meant to some that everything had to be unique. You couldn't have more than one copy of any article or document on the web for fear of being Google Slapped.

Suddenly, all the "experts" were coming out of the woodwork with advice and software to assist people to find ways of "spinning" articles so they came off as unique and non-duplicated. Big bucks were made for people coming out with article spinning software that would rearrange an article's paragraph structure and changing around some of the keywords.

Unfortunately, most of these tools would make an article so unreadable and absurd that the author came off looking like a moron. But it solved the big problem of duplicate content though!

Of course what no one thought of at the time but a few who could see through the frenzy, was the matter of link popularity and the weight the search engines gave to documents viewed by others as important. If an article was posted and reposted on hundreds of sites, it indicated people felt it was good enough and important enough to share.

Ahem, what this means is, having a highly popular document on the web gave it more power, and in turn gave more value to the site it linked to.

Think of it this way . . .

A book becomes a #1 best seller. Why? Because a lot of people buy it, of course! They don't buy variations of the book, with different wording, or shuffled chapters. They buy the book, and the more it gets bought, the more popular and valuable it becomes.

Why would anyone think documents on the web would be any different?

So if the "duplicate content experts" think their approach to the issue is correct, then its in direct conflict with Google's methods of determining popularity, value and ranking. Either Google has some diabolical plan to trip everybody up, or these teachers of panic and dread are dead wrong.

But the case in point is, someone decided to teach something about duplicate content that wasn't commonly known and it created an explosion of activity. Article spinning software flew off the "shelves" and thousands of ebooks and reports were purchased and used to guide the fearful around the deep waters where the Google Slap lives.

Now no one is telling you to do anything deceptive, or disseminate false information. This case study is just to show you how, by taking an issue and teaching something no one else is, you can create a real flow of interest.

And you can do this with just about any topic. It's all about finding a different viewpoint than others have, and making it known through your articles.

This case study actually had a two-fold purpose. It showed you how easy it can be to become a teacher rather than a marketer, and how you could turn that into big profits. But it also touched on the issue of unique content and some misconceptions about it.

Unique is about concept, not structure. What the search engines look for in an article is options. They want to provide their users with as many viewpoints as possible, so providing them with one will make them very happy to display it for you. It doesn't have to be a drastic 360 degree turn around from what others are saying either. Just a slight tilt of perspective will do the trick.

You may not create an explosion of panic like this duplicate content issue did, but the true mark of a good teacher is in his or her ability to persuade, not force. It might take a little longer to get people to see your point of view, but the effects are much longer lasting than creating fad out of fear.

In the next article we'll look at some ways to take any topic in a new direction and how doing so will win you some appreciative followers who may just accept you as their teacher.

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