Article Rewriting Tips: Tackling Duplicate Content

DupeFree Pro is all about rewriting content effectively in order to avoid duplicate content problems. So we thought we would provide some of our own thoughts on what you should do when rewriting your articles…

1) - How much should you rewrite?

Rewriting articles fully getting as close to 100% difference is obviously ideal and your ultimate goal. However, this is not always possible or practical due to time constraints or article elements such as long keyword phrases and topic specific jargon that has to be kept as is. 

We always aim to make the rewrite 90% different from the original. Sometimes you will fall short landing nearer 80% but we feel as long as you stay above 75% you should generally be alright. 

The important thing is to try to rework as much of the original article as possible (note I did not say ‘reword’). 

This can seem daunting at first but if you view it as process of injecting your own personality and flair in to an article it becomes less intimidating.

2) - Does mixing up the order of content help?

Reordering article content to further uniqueness might well help. But if the Search Engines check for duplicate content at multiple stages and look at the snippet level as they report they now do then this will be transparent to them.

Most duplicate content tools such as DupeFree Pro and CopyScape work at the snippet level and so it would not be surprising if the Search Engines do so with even greater complexity.

Changing the overall layout of an article is probably a good thing however, because as well as giving the whole page a more unique footprint the process of doing so can actually make rewriting an article more fluid.

Try adding bulleted lists and splitting paragraphs up further or placing in sub-headers.

3) - Is adding extra content necessary?

Adding extra *researched* content can be a great way to boost an article by offering something extra to the reader and making it even more unique from the original. Only do this however, if you have something worth adding. 

Just stretching the rewrite out with filler will do you more harm than good. Visitors will spot it straight off. 

Most PLR content available online is glorified filler. It is critical your original article is of a good standard otherwise you’ll find yourself forced in to researching the topic and writing the article you should have had in the first place. 

A bad original article wastes your time, disappoints your visitors and damages your income. 

Finding quality PLR content is one of the big crux’s of this game. Get good content and you’ll have happy traffic who will gobble up your articles and your affiliate links!

4) - Can you get away with just adding an intro and/or commentary?

We have a few sites that are made up purely of free reprint articles from the article directories. We commissioned a writer to create unique commentary-style introductions for each reprint rights article. These intros were roughly 20% the size of their respective articles. As well as this we placed RSS feeds at the base of each article page.

The result?

Some decent top rankings achieved in MSN, limited but still some fair rankings for Yahoo and Google didn’t and still doesn’t want to know (no surprises there!).

At time of writing one particular site is about 10 months old and the domain was not registered beforehand. The site has had only typical link building strategies applied which are currently still in operation. Nothing spammy has been carried out.

Right now the site still retains many of the rankings (particularly in MSN) but they are starting to slip along with the total volume of traffic despite the site continuously growing and gaining new backlinks. Also a notable amount of de-indexing is happening at Yahoo! & Google.

Of course every situation is unique and someone could do exactly what we did and get a totally different outcome.

But the results of this and other similar experiments we’ve done are all telling us that adding a small amount of extra unique content around substantially duplicate content is really not a solution for long term rankings.

5) - Should you keep the original article keywords or change them? 

Most of the time articles are optimized for just one keyword phrase and that’s it. This is particularly true with PLR content. 

This is a real shame because if that one keyword doesn’t perform for you then you are leaving the rest of an articles possible rankings up to fate. 

Use the rewrite as an opportunity to take control and add multiple extra keywords in to the article. 

Find 2 to 4 promising but relevant keywords using your favourite keyword tool (you can use the LSI keyword finder in DupeFree Pro) and also find alternative phrases/synonyms for them. The reason being you want your content to be as natural and easy to read as possible. Saying the same phrase repeatedly over and over isn’t very natural and will look weird to your visitors. 

Adding extra keywords takes time but is something you should definitely do, especially if you are rewriting PLR articles. From our experience PLR articles are usually optimized for just one keyword phrase and often a ridiculous one at that. One that would require an army of SEO experts and blue-chip funding to rank for(!).

I hope you’ve found these article rewriting tips useful.

If you agree/disagree with anything we say, please do add your comments below. We always enjoy getting feedback so please feel free to let us know your thoughts.

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11 June 2007 | Article Writing | Comments