Over the last couple of years, I’ve become a big fan of the Open Source community and those companies offering users alternatives to high price commercial products.  AntiVirus software has become a huge money making business for companies like Symantic and McAfee (and countless others).  At $40 - $75 per year for antivirus subscription software, it starts to get a little ridiculous on how far you have to go to protect an operating system that should be better equipped to handle virus threats to begin with (ie. Windows)!

I have been using AVG Free AntiVirus software from Grisoft for a couple of years, and have been very happy with the protection it has provided me.  Also, since it just does antivirus checking and repairing, your system won’t feel as sluggish as it does when using Symantec or McAfee’s suite of products.  Combine those features with zero cost, and you have yourself one great free antivirus product for your personal PC.

In addition to Free AntiVirus software, they also offer Free Anti-Spyware and Free Anti-Rootkit software.

Sometimes the shortest and simplest articles are the ones that provide the most use and benefit to readers.  That is why I have decided to compose weekly tips (TOTW’s) in an effort to convey practical ideas, suggestions, work-arounds, and other bits of information that my readers may find useful in managing their online businesses, websites and blogs.

If I get many questions or comments for further explanation on a TOTW, I will gladly try to write-up a more extensive summary in a future post. 

For my first “Tip of the Week”, I would like to give you some advice about Article Submissions.

Google loves original content!  When you submit your articles to online directories and services, such as EzineArticles and GoArticles, DO NOT place the same article on your website or blog.  If you do, you may incur a duplicate content penalty from Google and other web crawlers.  These companies may then remove your article from their index.  The last thing you want is to hurt your page rank.

The best thing to do is either, not put the article on your site at all, or rewrite the artilce and only place that version on your website or blog.  Let all the other publishers of your article incur the penalty while you benefit from all the back-links that your article is creating.