This post builds off a previous article entitled, ‘PLR and the Search Engine Connection’.  You may want to review it first.

Presently, Google considers duplicate documents which are duplicate web pages (where the entire page is the same) AND query-specific duplicate documents (where only part of the web page is the same).

So, if even just text on part of the page is the same, the page may be flagged as query-specific duplicate content. This includes text like data feeds, product listings, paragraphs of text, and link directories with the same descriptions.

That’s pretty darn sophisticated if you think about it.

When Google crawls a page for the first time, it determines right then and there if the document is a whole duplicate page. If the page turns out to be a duplicate, it is labeled as such.

Google will not crawl duplicate pages as often and these go in what’s called the supplemental index. The pages in the supplemental index are not given as much weight as those in the regular index. They tend to rank much lower … if at all.

Note: It is possible that older, more established, higher authority pages may be crawled more often even if they are duplicates, but for the most part, it is thought that duplicate pages are not part of Google’s regular index.

So if you’re putting up web pages with the same content as other web pages out there, you’re already not going to see a high search engine ranking out of that page.

For all essential purposes, you’re done.

Let’s get into the other half of the duplicate content story; query-specific duplicate content. This type of duplicate content is detected at search time. So although your page may make it into Google’s regular index initially, there’s still one more hurdle to overcome.

When a surfer searches for a term, Google finds the top 1,000 pages from its database and scans the pages for the searched term(s). It pulls out the parts of the pages with the most keywords and examines it for duplicate content. If duplicate content in those queried snippets is detected, Google ranks those pages as less important (and further down the rankings you go).

So what does all this mean?

Write unique content if you want search engine rankings.

I’ve boiled it down to as simple and blunt a fact as possible…

If you want to gain traffic from the search engines, you’re going to need to have unique content on your site.

Even if you have PLR articles on your site and you’re getting some search engine traffic from it, just wait, the technology for detecting duplicate content will get even better and it’s unlikely that you’ll see the same level of traffic in the future.

There is a whole bunch of documentation on duplicate content if you’re willing to look outside search engine and internet marketing forums.

I’m not going to get into all of it here, because the detection methods for it are complex and it isn’t really necessary for you to understand it all.

But trust me, it’s scary how well duplicate content can be detected.

This didn’t start just recently with search engines. Science and computer geeks have been creating ways to do this for detecting copyright infringement in the digital library era.

So the technology wasn’t necessarily created to bust people trying to earn a living off the internet. But it’s being used indirectly for that purpose (I say indirectly because I don’t really think Google is trying to bust anyone … they just want to stay on top of the search engine market).

While Yahoo and MSN don’t yet have the same powerful technology as Google, you can bet they’re working on it.

To get back into search engine reality, if we go back to my “weight loss in santa monica” example from the previous article, ‘PLR and the Search Engine Connection’ what happens when you type the phrase into the Google search bar?

Google quickly returns the top results from its index of unique content. That means the web page created with Method #2 is probably going to get put in Google’s supplemental index as soon as it’s indexed. It’s not going to show up in the results anywhere near the top as long as Google thinks there’s some unique content to show its users.

So Method #2 has a slim (if any) chance of getting search engine traffic.

Here’s another important point to make. If you go to the trouble of writing unique content, never, ever also submit that content to an article directory or allow other sites to use it (at least not in full). You need separate content for promoting your site.

Don’t believe me?

A few years ago when article marketing became all the rage, I thought I’d take some of my nice, unique articles and submit them through an article directory submission service.

Bad idea.

Sure these articles were on my site first, but it really doesn’t matter.

Each article on my site that was submitted all over is now in the supplemental index. These pages get next to no traffic.

It was a sad day when I realized what I’d done.

I can look back on what I did and see that even the pages on EzineArticles with my articles (a well established article directory with high PR) still show up as supplemental results and get next to no traffic.

So, if you write unique content you never want to put that article on your site and then send it out to article sites.

I learned my lesson the hard way and am trying to spare you from it.

Hopefully you’re starting to see that if you want to play the search engine game, you’re going to need unique content on your site.

Period.

If you want to get links through article marketing, you will need completely different content than what is on your site.

The fact is, putting PLR articles on your site will result in little to no search engine rankings. And contrary to what some say, you can’t just switch out synonyms and expect that to get by Google’s filters (trust me, I could write a whole other report on my findings with this).

If you have to go to the trouble of re-writing the articles from scratch then what’s the point? You need to write (or have someone else write) the articles you build your site around.

You can get a ton of search engine traffic (free traffic) with unique articles that were written with a plan in mind.

And if you’re going to spend any money on the PPC’s, the last thing you should do is slap some PLR articles up with adsense ads around them. This may have worked in the past, but it won’t work for long now with the implementation of Google’s quality score.

I’m not trying to put anyone out of business. There are other ways to use PLR articles and the smart memberships are going to push those methods. But if you want to truly come out on top in the search engines, you’re going to need to invest in getting unique content as “search engine bait”.  Unfortunately, I just don’t see any way around it.