How Long Until Old Content Becomes 'Unique' Again?

Hey guys,

Sorry if this question has already been asked but I couldn't find it anywhere...

What I was wondering is how long it takes for Google to 'forget' old content so that Copyscape would find it unique again. Say you had an old website that went down years ago, how long would it take until you could sell the articles again? Would that ever happen? The reason I ask is that I have literally hundreds of thousands of words from an old site that I would love to sell and I was wondering if I'd ever be able too.

Have any of you guys thought about hanging onto your old content? Thanks in advance!

 

From my understanding data banks have a long memory, in fact I believe they are infinite.

 

Thanks for the response, that's a shame! I suppose other methods of using content are the order of the day then (like eBooks)...

 

it's not a total loss, however. Why don't you re-write your content? Change it by 25% or so and then resell it? if it's a few years old, it may need some polishing anyway. Times have changed, information may need updating, etc. I don't know about you, but as a writer, I'm getting better with each thing I write. I'm much better now than I was 5 years ago, and theoretically, I'll be better in 5 years than today... this is hard to imagine, since I'm so awesome now lol

 

Fo sho! I know looking back at some of my old content makes me cringe now! And like you say, it's odd because at the time it felt fine so it's just a mark of gradual improvement

Is 25% enough though? I would think it would need to be more than that, at which point I'd perhaps be better just writing something new from scratch... Is this something you've done in the past?

 

Well, 25% is pretty arbitrary... you really are better off re writing. But my thought was that if it's old... you could get away with a partial. I don't usually do this, for me it's often just easier to write from scratch than to try and rework something. Just depends, I guess.

 

I thought Copyscape primarily used Google results. If things are offline long enough, they do fall out of the Google database. Therefore, it would seem they would fall out of Copyscape too. I don't use Copyscape, so I could be wrong with that.

I know Google drops things that are no longer online. My hacked blog was down for 2 months and virtually all of it disappeared. When I got it back online, Google treated it like a new site. It did regain the PR score but the traffic has never recovered.

The one caveat to that is Archive.org/Way Back Machine. I don't think Google indexes that but it would certainly be a place I would look if I were worried about the originality of the content on something I was buying from an old site.

All this assumes that you owned/wrote the original content and are the actual copyright holder. If not, the content not being indexed is not at issue as much as copyright is. If you sold the content, the buyer still owns it, even if it is offline.

 

That's an interesting question. In theory Google's databases must be far from infinite. So, they shouldn't keep track of old, useless content. However, some texts of old are still important and driving traffic. So, I think if your content had been produced 3-4 years ago, Google, and thus copyscape will find it. If it's older, you can give a try with minor rewrite.
But can you be sure that nobody copy-pasted your content at times when it had been on-line? And it's not available somewhere in the Internet...

 

If you're purely basing it on Copyscape, it takes a couple of months. I used to have loads of articles on Hubpages which I am in the process of taking down and reselling. So long as no other site has stolen and republished your content, you can expect Copyscape to show the content as unique after a couple of months.