If you are interested in driving traffic to your website using search engine optimization (SEO), then you have probably read about the dangers of using duplicate content on your site. The concept of duplicate content applies both to content on the same site and content on different sites. But when it comes to posts, articles or pages, the conversation about duplicate content most often refers to using private label rights (PLR) content and whether or not it can be used “as is”, or whether it needs to be rewritten.
A lot of the discussion centers around whether or not Google penalizes websites for having content gets duplicated on another website. So webmasters who use private label rights articles for their websites and blogs wonder whether they can use the PLR articles "as is" or whether they have to rewrite them. And if they have to rewrite them to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, how much do they have to rewrite them?
After all, most content written in English has some basic natural duplication, thanks to common words like pronouns and articles (“the”, “an”, “a”, etc). To add to the confusion, there are many people who say that Google's duplicate content penalty does not really exist. So if you are a webmaster trying to optimize for search traffic, who do you believe and what's the best strategy for your website?
Sometimes it just makes life much easier, when there's so much controversy around an issue, to remove the issue altogether. Make it a non-issue. In this case, it really does make a webmaster's life easier to just not use duplicate content. That means either writing original content, paying for someone to write original content, or making sure that you rewrite all of your private label rights content.
Some people say that rewriting your content by 30% is enough to make it qualify as original content. Other people say that you need to rewrite it by 70%. Again, do you make the rewriting percentage an issue or a non-issue?
If you really don't want to worry about duplicate content at all, then rewrite your private label rights articles by at least 70% and you have almost made duplicate content a non-issue for your website. Why do I say almost? Because you still have to find a way to measure the percentage of rewriting to make sure it's been done to your specifications. The easiest way to do that is to use a duplicate content checking tool, like DupeCop Desktop, that can sit right on your computer's desktop, ready for whenever you need it to check your PLR content.
