PLR Articles - Are They Worth It?

PLR articles are private label resell articles. That means that once you purchase the article / content you are free to resell it.

A common belief in SEO / Internet marketing circles is that if you purchase PLR articles you can then spin them (reword them) and make them unique enough to promote as your own without incurring any duplicate content penalties from Google.

The main problem I have with this is: How much of a difference do you have to make to an article / page / piece of content before it becomes unique in the eyes of the search engine?

Plus, if you are only rewriting it purely to get round the duplicate content filter, surely it isn't going to be saying much new that isn't already available ... therefore you're unlikely to get people linking to it ... and therefore unlikely to gain much benefit from it.

My other problem is probably more personal. You see, when I write an article I want it to have value and be genuinely useful to myself (as a reference) as well as a website visitor. Therefore I often find it difficult purely to switch a few words around and change a pre-written article.

Very often I'll end up scraping it and writing my own from scratch anyway .... so there's no huge benefit for me to buy PLR articles.

That said, I'm sure people will continue to buy them & tweak them & they will continue to evade the dup. content filter ... but shame on you! Bring some value to the web & your followers and they'll be forever greatful :)

Adam Gardner is a freelance SEO / Social Media Expert. Follow him on twitter @agseo or subscribe to this blog via RSS.