You’ve grabbed some terrific PLR (Private Label Rights) content. But how do you use it to your best advantage while avoiding roadblocks?

First, what are PLR Articles? In a nutshell, it is content written by skilled writers for your personal use. You can change the content, add to it, take away from it, add affiliate links, claim it as your own, blog it, use it as content for your niche sites, submit it to article directories and more. It's an absolutely wonderful way to add content when you simply don't have the time or skills to do it yourself!

Search engines are trying to feed surfers relevant results. To do that, along with other things, they have to scan the on-page content. If you think that having the same content on two different sites gives you two chances to be ranked high in the results, think again. They got wise to that trick a long time ago. ;)

Search engines have complicated algorithms that can be difficult to reverse engineer. But one thing is certain: if the exact same content is used across multiple websites, you can suffer a duplicate content penalty. Rewriting PLR content is the best way to deal with that problem. It takes a little more work, but it’s a sure bet.

It’s difficult to know exactly how much to change, but even changing only 10% of the content can easily put you in the clear. Out of a 500 word article, that’s only 50 words - less than one paragraph’s worth over all. Pretty easy.

Tailoring content has another advantage. You can give your site a unique ‘flavor’ by modifying the PLR article to something that sounds more like how you would write.

When you do that with a number of articles, you are guaranteed to differentiate your site from your competitor. That keeps visitors and customers loyal, because then you are the only one in the world with exactly that content. After all, there are lots of actors in the world, but there’s only one Harrison Ford.

You could avoid the duplicate content issue entirely by writing every article from scratch. But that’s time consuming and not everyone has the interest or ability. To run a successful site, you have lots of things to do every day. Whatever time you spend writing, you’re not doing those other things.

Starting from a blank page is much tougher. It’s a lot easier to re-write something than to write from just a topic idea. Changing a phrase here or an example there is easy and the writing that’s already on the page stimulates you to think of alternatives.

Quality counts, too. You may not have the ability or interest to write great content, content that attracts visitors and backlinks. Even if you can, it takes time to do well. If you don’t take the time, you’ll end up with content that isn’t polished. That turns people off. Not a good business strategy.

It’s much quicker and easier to modify good quality content to avoid a duplicate content penalty and make it your own than it is to fix up junk. You can polish good chrome to a shine in a few minutes. If it’s rusty, you’ll spend all day!

Have fun and much success! ;)


Tony Thomas