Hello! everybody knows that having all unique articles on a web site is better than having all articles taken from article directories. This is self evident. But I have a different question : suppose I create a new web site and start out with all unique, original articles, let's say 20 original articles; if I later add some non-unique articles from article directories or PLR articles, will that be very detrimental to my site? If all of the unique content causes the site to have a high ranking, will adding non unique content later on, cause the ranking to go down? ( Assuming that everything else is the same : number and quality of links, on page optimization, etc.) Does anyone have any ideas about this ? Thank you for any comments, Robert
You won't get much rankings based just on having unique content. You also need a lot of backlinks. If you add non-unique articles, the search engines probably wouldn't index that page. So it may be a wasted effort. If some of your unique articles get good rankings, adding non-unique content to a different page on your website won't affect that ranking. If you add a lot of non-unique articles I think your domain could get penalized. Part of it may depend on how much trust you have built up with Google. You build up trust by having quality backlinks, having unique content, by avoiding anything spammy and simply by being aged. You would be much better off if you stick to unique content only. Then each new page is a potential landing page for a new set of keywords. Each new page would be helping your other pages as well.
Very true.. I've seen many clients try this and only this, but traffic and PR ranking didn't change. Once backlinks were added the site rankings improved tremendously.