Internet Business Blog

Over the past few months, the (Internet Marketing) market for Private Label Rights (PLR) content has boomed. Fueled by such things as:

• Using articles with embedded links to get strong, one-way links to a website. PLR articles can provide a basis from which a lazy author can have a chance at submitting to high-ranking article directories.
• Articles can be used as spider bait, attracting search engines bots with the aim of getting a website indexed.
• Content can be used as relevant filler between advertisements from pay-per-click (PPC) schemes such as Google AdSense.
• The drive to build one’s own ‘list’ can leave some wanting good content that they can send out to keep subscribers aware of their existence.

One of the often touted benefits of PLR articles is that they can be easily tweaked to produce ‘unique content’. Some suppliers of PLR content will even limit their distribution to ensure that they aren’t made available to too many people.

A couple of thoughts on this:

1. Just what is considered to be ‘unique content’? Unless you’re fabricating new words in a particular language, every time you publish any content it will have already been duplicated to some degree. Look at the words I’ve written on this website; you’ll see a lot of them appearing on other websites and yet it’s not falling foul of any particular duplicate content penalty (whether or not you subscribe to that theory is another matter). It seems reasonable to surmise that there is some clever processing going on when search engines determine what is and what isn’t ‘duplicate content’. The pertinent question is whether or not any amount of tweaking will push a PLR article into unique country.
2. Even for someone who doesn’t mind an amount of writing, such as me, reworking PLR articles can become a bit of a chore. I have a particular style of writing and when I attempt to tweak an article that someone else has written I often feel like I’m having to completely rewrite in order to make them read like my writing as opposed to just tweaking. For some articles, it’s simply much quicker if I write from scratch unless it’s a topic that I really know nothing about.

The whole debate about duplicate content is one I find fascinating. Just how do search engines determine what is a duplicate?

As for the duplicate content penalty, if you search for “how to put an xml feed on your webpage” then you’ll see most of the websites that are republishing my article. Click forward a few pages of results and you’ll eventually get to…

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 25 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

If your website is publishing duplicate content and it ends up in that section omitted results then it might seem to you like you’re being treated differently for doing so.

Seems very much to me that being left out of the most visible results is a penalty for publishing duplicate content i.e. a duplicate content penalty.

A question that a lot of publishers may well ponder over is just how different does a webpage need to be before it’s considered unique?

Is it enough to swap a few synonyms and add a few extra paragraphs to a PLR article to make it unique in the eyes of a search engine?

So just who might want to resort to using PLR articles above sourcing their own content?

There’s nothing wrong with using PLR content, but you should be aware of just what you can do with it, the potential pitfalls if you don’t rewrite/tweak it and the amount of effort required to do so to a sufficient degree that it gets treated as unique content.

If you’re not overly concerned about having unique content then PLR articles can be a great way to offer content for people to read or to fill out PPC websites (those created primarily to profit from PPC schemes).