PLR Content: SEO or SOL?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

Yesterday I talked about the importance of content. I even some got some useful comments. Thanks guys!

I still see these PLR packages being sold for $29.99 or for the reduced $14.95 if you buy it now, or free if you purchase somebody’s brand new gold widget with a kung fu grip and a secret handshake. I always wonder how many of them actually get sold. They must be selling because they wouldn’t be on the market if no one ever bought them.

PLR, if you don’t know, stands for private label rights. Essentially, it means you are buying pre-written content that you have a right to use as you wish after you purchase it. The problem with PLR is that other people are buying it too. If you were to buy PLR content and reprint it in newspapers all across the country, you might actually sell something and few people would notice. If they did, they wouldn’t care and the fact that the reprinted content reads exactly the same 1,000 times in different print publications won’t count against you anywhere. It probably won’t even affect how many copies of your secret handshake that you sell.

Online, however, it’s a different story. Buy PLR and you’re dead – literally. That’s because the search engines penalize – yes, penalize – duplicate content. In fact, if two web pages look the same, with the same exact content on them, then one of them won’t achieve any rankings at all. And the search engines will decide which one. It’s not always “first come, first serve.”

The only way PLR will benefit you is if you rewrite the content completely so that it is unrecognizable. And if you’re going to do that then you might as well just save your money and write your content from scratch. At least then you can create your own secret handshake.