What is unique content?

Here's a question for all you seo experts, freelance writers and other unique content junkies:

What makes a unique article?

Lets say you've got a random article from article database and you want it to be unique, in terms of google of course and interesting for people to read.

So here are few suggestions, choose your best fit:

1. By replacing words with their synonyms, you get an unique article in the eyes of google.
If so then how many words should be replaced? Is it like 3% or 13%?

2. You can only get a unique article by replacing whole phrases and reordering paragraphs.

3. The only way to get a unique article is to write it!

Any thoughts and ideas on this?

 

Replacing synonyms often doesn't work because google will look at sentence structure. You probably can get a unique article (in the eyes of google) by replacing whole phrases and reording paragraphs (likely to make the article a bit disjointed though.

Just because you write an article doesn't really make it unique! It may not really have anything new that hasn't been written before!

A good tool to use may be copyscape.com so you can see how differentiated your article is from another article out there.

~Jamie

 

yeah, but it's almost impossible to trick myscape, it notices copycats no matter what you do

 

Just write another unique one, instead of trying to fool SEs

 

ok, thanks for the votes guys, it helped me a lot

 

Making an article 'unique' by re-wording another, I like it.

What irony!

I actually thought this thread was going to be about how to come up with unique ideas for articles in your field. Oh well.

Fuck it, I'm hi-jacking this thread.

Lets discuss effective linkbaiting with unique content and press releases.

Pete

 

There should be a law in UK for gadood alike people.

 

Most certainly, write your own article. Preferably, without using someone else's article as a resource.

 

just trying to figure out few things...
you write an article and it's unique, but why would google care?
If your keyword popularity is better and you get more quality links and PR you rank higher but how is it related to the fact it's unique or not?

Do you think google checks if the content is unique/not used in other pages and then you rank better? Sounds stupid to me.. May be these are just the new words your add to the article so you rank for them..?

I'm definitely not getting to it..

hehe I liked that one

 

No.. It just penalises sites with duplicate content.

It doesn't position better the original, or stuff like that.

That was just my 2 cents about the guy

 

Are you claiming that if there are two pages with the same content (well it's never the same html code, but a very close) google will ban/penalize one of them..?
Which one ?
And why do we see so many sites using the same articles, the same syndicated feeds and all the same content, but still ranking good..?

I still don't get it..

 

Well it is roumered (nobody can pinpoint this for sure, except Google) that Google penalises sites which own the same content as others. As to which one, i am not sure. There have been cases where actually the original was penalised (i myself had such a case).

You will never have the same content ratio of the other website, by just taking an rss feed and putting that into your website. THere is much other content sorrounding that copied text. Footer, sideway menius and modules, footers, etc etc.

They still rank good, because the other 95% of the website's content is original perhaps (just my guess).

 

hehe ok, thanks
it proved me again that all seo is just about building links and keywords and knowing that makes me a seo expert too

 

Just like all the other 45347635632 SEO experts out there

 

here, it's actually 1,860,000 seo experts

But I think the only thing that defines a serious seo expert is a large network of sites which he can use to link and rank

 

it goes like this: while unique content doesn't directly help rankings, those contents attract links, since people find it a good site. more links = higher rankings.

 

that's a good comment too! May be even the main reason

 

It should be worth noting that you can not just take someone else's article and change some words and sentences and call it yours. This is plagiarism and breaks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and someone could report you to google and get your whole website banned.

I have done this before and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Now with that said duplicate content doesn't get your site banned, or penalized, it just doesn't help. It's pretty much useless unless the articles are just for good reading for your visitors.