Can I use a mix of non-unique and unique content articles on my blog to provide more information about my niche on my site? My intention is to rank high in the serps with long tail keywords, not to get a high PR. I have been reading a lot and know that a high PR is not related to high serps. Thanks PS. I just want to mix 50% unique content and 50% non-unique content on my blog.
Google has got REALLY good at spotting duplicate content and can remove whole sections of domains that use it. In 2005 I started using Amazons XML feed to create large stores, I must have had a couple of million pages indexed that was Amazon products. At first it went really well, I was getting $10,000+ cheques from Amazon and similar from AdSense (had AdSense on the sites as well), but as time passed I found each store got penalised. One store for example that sold Poetry books was getting 6-8,000 unique visitors a day, when penalised it dropped to below 100. I've also tried the article directory site, but got into that too late and it never did well. So I can confirm using only copied content is a waste of time. I still do Amazon stores, but I feed them traffic from other sites (I nofollow links to them) since Google doesn't send them any traffic. I tried one about a year ago (used real links, no nofollow) that I hoped would get a lot of traffic and would eventually be penalised like the rest, but it never did well, so looks like Google doesn't even need time now to find duplicate content. Some of my stores were on existing sites with a lot of traffic already and even though the store sections were penalised the main sites were unaffected. I found you can put up an Amazon store in a sub directory and it won't harm your sites existing SERPs. I haven't tried what your suggesting and would be concerned the entire site would be penalised because it's all mixed together. On my Amazon stores I'd create unique home pages and they were penalised along with the rest of the section, so if the site is important to you I wouldn't risk it. David Law
A good majority of sites use some duplicate content. This is not a problem as long as you are not using copyrighted article that belong to someone else. Google penalizes for duplicate content when the whole site is just RSS feeds or copied from elsewhere. Many people use PLR articles mixed with their own original content without any wrath from Google. Much of the myth came during the boom of MFA sites that relied on the same duplicate content that everyone else was using. These are the sites that were de-indexed or banned by Adsense and Google search. I personally prefer to write my own and have articles that are all original and unique. The worse part I see with duplicate content is that your readers will catch it and quit coming. Write for them not Google!
Affiliate based content isn't a copyright infringement, and yet Google regularly penalizes affiliate based content sites. There was a leaked document about this sort of thing (forget the name of it) that said Google reviewers are to penalise content that have affiliate content that offer no added benefit. So if you use affiliate based content as supplied by the affiliate and add nothing of value (if you had your own unique reviews that would add value) then Google will eventually penalise it. I will add from personal experience you are right with public domain content though, if no one own the content Google ranks it based on other factors. I have some sites running public domain content that do very well. AdSense has nothing to do with this, it's a reality that duplicate content is not liked by Google for very good reasons: why list 20 sites listing Amazons stock when they can list Amazon. Would be in Googles best interest to rank MFA sites well since they'd make more money, so AdSense isn't a reason. Little more complex when it comes to copying others content through rss feeds etc... since it's going to be harder for Google to determine who wrote the original especially when the originator of the contents site and the copiers have the same content within hours of one another. In this case it sometimes goes wrong and the originator of the content gets their site penalised! Just to make it clear, penalised does not mean banned, you can find many penalised pages within Google, but they don't get the rankings they should get based on the content, links etc... David Law