Personally I have always used or aimed to use unqiue content as that is the wise thing to do, but it does make you sit back and think. Here goes, you buy unqiue content and the likely chance of it becoming duplicate in the end is high due to people stealing it and then republishing it on their own site or using it as their own article to promote their own services. Now looking at the overall effect with unique content and duplicate content in Google. Which site would do better, a unqiue content site or a duplicate content site? Well Digtalpoint is doing well and it has unique content mainly. But then again we have Goarticles, ArticlesBase and EzineArticles which are article banks that is just a site of duplicate articles realistically. Now all 3 of them sites are doing pretty well espeically EzineArticles. Infact I believe EzineArticles is getting more traffic from the search engines than Digitalpoint. So it does make you wonder. In anycase, I'm more concerned for my visitors than the search engines, so will always aim for unique content.
I always remember Matt Cutts in his videos saying that Google considers unique, informative and relevant content. People stealing duplicate content is something that is hard to stop so duplication is unavoidable that is why Google considers authority over the content. Say you post a unique content today and someone steals your content and posts it on his website a couple of hours later, Google looks at the post date when it was initially crawled or indexed as says you were first and its yours and the others just copied your unique content.
Depends on how strong your site is - if your site ranks #1 of all sites that use the same content you dont need unique content
It is always good to pen down your own thoughts and original ideas/information in your own words but at times... it is also OK to share your visitors with some excellent writings that you come across... of course with due acknowledgment to the original source. In short... you should always look to share great information and make your site worth the visitor's time! Regards, RightMan
unique content always appreciate. The major search engine Google gives more importance to unique content
As much as possible, I think unique content is the best. Because Google wants people to find some new info all the time. So if you provide some new info, Google will reward you for that. Exact duplicate content, most of the time will be ignored by Google and placed on bad position on search results. But if change a little bit the content, it could be ok. For example, if you take an article, spin it and re-post it. Or you can keep the same entire article but at the beginning and at the end of this article, write an unique introduction and unique conclusion. It should be enough for Google to see your content as different from the duplicate article. But, if you really want write better content, again, nothing is better than unique content.
Joke question, right? After all, what would YOU rather have? 500 unique articles on 500 different sites around the web, or 500 identical copies of the same article around the web? Answers on a postcard...
good question. I've noticed some sites pick up an article months before others, yet the authority ones always tend to outrank the site that had the "original content" on it. Outside of an algorithm change "locking in" a result the ones with most authority will always tend to outrank the others.
Unique content will ALWAYS work better but the issue there is time and cost. Duplicate articles will gain you some traffic however more then likely will not rank in search engines since it is already on another site. A mixture of duplicate and unique articles is a good method to go with.
Of course unique content is best and even if your content does get copied and placed elsewhere it doesn't matter that much, as long as Google indexed your unique content first and they know that it was found on your site first. As far as article directories go, yes they do have duplicate content as many people copy from them but you will find that they have a huge number of articles that where unique to them first and Google will give them most credit for it. Logically you would think that if you wrote some original content and it was indexed by Google then other people copied it, this would benefit you. If Google was to find other people copying your content but know that it was yours first this should say that your content must have been pretty good for others to simply copy it.
According to update 3.3 of panda, fresh and unique content matters a lot for success of any website. Crawler does not like to duplicate content in any condition. So, it is good to avoid content duplicacy, if you do, Google may slap you with a ranking penalty.