Many people earn cash online using duplicate content. I know, you’ve probably heard of the so called duplicate content penalty and the like and been been afraid to use Private Label Rights (PLR) articles or other commonly available for your sites. In the mean time, sites that provide music lyrics, news and other clearly duplicate content have been making money online while many have been afraid to take action. Let’s look at a few ways to use duplicate content, primarily PLR articles, to your advantage.
Types of Content
First, let’s be clear. We’re not talking about autoblogging or ‘borrowing’ content from other blog’s RSS feeds and such. This isn’t a good idea for legal reasons and, even if you do have permission, it’s generally more difficult to rank well in Google with this kind of aggregated content without doing a huge amount of link building. Another kind of commonly used duplicate content are articles from article directories. While you can use RSS feeds to autoblog with this content, you are still likely to have ranking problems without massive external link building. I’ve gotten better results when using this content by manually managing the feed of content and adding a few tweaks to it that I’ll cover in a moment. However, there is a certain lack of flexibility in using this content as compared to PLR content since the article as a whole needs to stay intact and the original author’s resource box needs to remain.
A third kind of duplicate content are public domain and creative commons content. This content is available from old sources, published earlier than 1923 in the US, various government sources and places like Wikipedia. Using this can work just as well as PLR but it really depends on how you use it and where else it appears on the Internet. You’ll find it difficult to beat Wikipedia and government sources in Google search results although ranking just below them can bring in decent cash. Lastly, we have PLR, private label rights, articles. These articles are sold with various usage rights. Some are sold on a limited basis while others are mass distributed. They’re sold on eBay, on private seven dollar script sites and on paid membership sites. They’re often given away as bonuses on other purchases. For example, I give away PLR articles with a purchase of Blog Content Wizard. The nice thing about them is that you have the right to change them up and use them as you see fit.
How To Avoid Duplicate Content Filters with PLR Articles
OK, let’s assume that you’ve purchased PLR articles and now you’re wondering about the most effective way to use them on your site that you intend to monetize with Adsense, eBay’s EPN or other affiliate offers. What can you do to give your blog a more legit look, for it to convert well for you, for it to get buying search engine traffic and to offer sufficient value not to be branded as a ‘Made for Adsense/Affiliate’ site? Here are a few steps you can take.
1. Don’t use the stock title. Instead, rewrite the title so that it fits your keywords. Let’s say, for example, you have a PLR article titled “Factoring Can Be An Ideal Solution For Start-Up And/Or Growing Businesses”. It’s long, not really keyword focused and a Google search reveals that the article is already all over Google. Let’s change it to better focus on the keyword we want and make it more Google friendly, “Factoring for Small Businesses”.
2. Next, we’ll want to write an original opening paragraph that uses our primary keyword in the first sentence. Often you’ll find PLR articles start with fluff sentences that don’t fit the keyword focus of the articles. Writing a solid, original, 2-4 sentence opening paragraph with your desired keywords right up front has a great impact on the search engine placement, Adsense ‘bot’s understanding of the article and the general quality of the site to both ‘bots and visitors.
3. Add in a few simple changes to the main body of the PLR article. These can be a filler paragraph that restates the point of the article. It could be modifying a few sentences in the body of the article to use a synonym or switch it from active to passive voice or vice versa. The idea here is to break up the pattern and overall and paragraph length of the text so as to provide fewer points of similarity to algorithms analyzing it.
4. End the article with an original closing paragraph. This should also include your primary keyword in the last sentence just as the first sentence included your primary keyword.
5. To add an air of legitimacy and to provide extra value, add one or two links to authority sites, such as Wikipedia or CNN, in the last third of the article. Don’t worry about making them nofollow links. You want them to look natural and related to your topic.
6. Use the meta-tag features of All-in-One SEO or Platinum SEO to put an original description meta-tag for the article. Once again, you’ll be using your keywords. Just make sure that it is a syntactically correct sentence. Also use the WordPress excerpt function to create another alternative description of the post if your theme uses excerpts.
7. Use a related posts plugin to bring in content from other posts on your site. This places extra content on the article and breaks up the way algorithms look at your content.
8. Add tags to your post and make sure your theme displays them after the post. This has two advantages. First, this can cause your article to appear in search results under more keywords. For example, you may show up for both “How to Get a Home Equity Loan” for your main post slug (”yoursite.com/how-to-get-a-home-equity-loan/”). and then again for “Home Equity Loan Companies” for the tag slug (”yoursite.com/tag/home-equity-loans-companies/”). Secondly, it adds keyword content to your post that Google seems to like for some reason.
