Examining The Duplicate Content Myth about PLR Content

By karma and luck investigator Charles L Harmon

Have you heard about the duplicate content penalty that Google can put on anyone that uses PLR on their website? Many things about Google are hearsay and it often seems that nothing is straight forward when it comes to penalties Google can slap on a website or account yet not explain why they did it. If there’s one thing that scares an internet marketer a lot, it’s got to be the fear of having one or even all their sites de-indexed.

If not de-indexed, maybe pushed so far back in the searches they could never be found because of so-called duplicate content. But what if you were told you had a better chance of being ‘eaten by a barracuda’ than you would of being slammed for violating this ambiguous regulation set out by Google and possibly other search engines.

Let’s go on a safari. Bring a friend.

Expelling The Duplicate Penalty Myth

In the past when has a site been delisted directly as a result of using PLR content? It’s hard to know 100%, but it seems very rarely does it actually happen. In fact I haven’t met a single marketer who uses PLR content that has been caught violating the so-called duplicate content rule. What does this mean? It means that whatever you’ve been told about the connection between PLR content and it being duplicate content, is for want of a better term completely ‘bogus’.

We all know that when you purchase PLR content, the chances are you’re going to have to share it with a certain number of marketers. This in affect has been a major deterrent from purchasing such content, even though the real truth is, it’s completely safe.

So What Is The Duplicate Content Rule?

The duplicate content rule affects those who copy a site, word for word, as well as mimicking the exact design and layout of the other site in question. Well of course they’re going to delist you if you do this! You may as well download someone else’s site and re-upload it to your own server under a different domain! This is a no no in almost anyone’s book and you can expect dire consequences if you do that!

 

 

Using PLR content, however, on a completely unique looking site, won’t offend the search engines at all and why should it? Sure you may have some content on your site that is the same somewhere else, but you may also have some other unique content that will benefit the visitors to your site. Not only that, but if you think about it there are tons of sites that have some “duplicate content”, maybe even a lot.

Think of news sites, magazine type sites and there are others. Those types of sites have a lot of the same exact news as other similar sites, especially if they use a news service such as AP or Reuters, and other such services.

Rewriting PLR Content

I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking. Maybe its “why has this guy been telling us this whole time that PLR content is completely safe and now he’s going to talk about rewriting it!” Well the truth be known, there are more advantages to using unique content then there is for using just straight copied PLR content.

Think about it for a minute. Would the search engines be more likely to rank a page with unique content rather then a page that has the same content found elsewhere? Of course they would! Now you might be thinking “what’s the point in even having PLR content?” Well when we say rewrite that only means rewriting a portion of the PLR content you have available. 25% would be a good amount to aim for, which should take you hardly any time at all assuming the PLR is not some thousands of words tome.

Rewriting some of the content insures your pages are going to be looked at favorably by the search engines as being unique content, which will more than likely boost their rankings up higher than those articles copied word for word. Aside from that most people want something at least partly unique to them and that is not possible using PLR when lots of others have the same exact content.

The Takeaway

There is nothing wrong with using PLR or private label rights content. For best results and to insure some uniqueness you should rewrite a part or parts of the content. That way it becomes more unique and has some of your voice in it. Sometimes it is relatively easy to “rewrite” PLR without doing a lot of work. Take for example, this article on my travel site. I needed a long article with lots of keywords in it. So I searched around my hard drive for articles that had some similarity in one way or another.

What I did was combine five articles, change or rewrote a minimum of content, added some statistics, added pictures, and lo and behold I ended up with a unique article that no one else had. Yes maybe a small number of people might have had one or more of the original articles on their site, but none would have the exact same set of articles I had all in one long article.