Does It Pay to Have Unique Content

With the ever expanding Web 2.0 medium giving the ability for website owners to freely publish content for gaining traffic and backlinks almost wherever they want, you commonly find that the content that they use is not unique and is often recycled from their own blog posts or articles they have written.

Additionally you also have services (i.e. article directories) that will distribute your submitted written articles to a multitude of other websites that publish the article as well. So potentially you could have your blog posts posted all over the web gaining traffic and backlinks back to your site.

Now the question is, does it pay to keep the content you post on your website unique from the content that you have published elsewhere or is it fine to publish your same posts unaltered everywhere?

The Duplicate Content Debate

The debate that many people have is that recycling posts causes duplicate content and may discredit your website in the search engines. While on the other hand, many people say that search engines only recognise and display one of the articles and therefore if first posted on your website it won’t affect your sites ranking.

To be honest they are both kind of right, but are you willing to run the risk of being punished.

Plus, Google decides which article is most relevant, not just the one that is posted first. Therefore, if a site that is more popular and has more relevant content publishes a duplicate article you have submitted there is the possibility that they will out-rank your website, thus knocking yours out of the search results. Which Google also explains in their blog post about duplicate content.

Rewriting Content

This option is most definitely the preferred option in my opinion, as there is little to no risk of being caught out for having duplicate content. So how do rewrite an article without having it appear as duplicate content? There was a time when all you needed to do was get the thesaurus out and change a few words, but this is no longer the case.

It still can be rather easy though, for example you can simply rewrite the article so it says the same thing in a different way that includes changing the title and description, or you can make use of content spinners.

Just be careful to maintain quality when doing this as you don’t want poor articles associated with your name and website being spread around the web.

How to Still Reuse Content

If you still want to re-use your content, there are ways of doing it that won’t have any affects in the search engines. That is to re-use your content in places that won’t get indexed, such as in ebooks, in your email newsletters, as an AutoResponder or even turn them into audio and/or video.

Overall in my opinion it does pay to have unique content as the little effort that it requires to rewrite articles is well worth it.