unique content isn't that important. just consider the billions of things that are repeated on a daily basis across all trusted and high ranked sites. everything from quotes, to common sayings and phrases, etc...
having something that's duplicate on your site doesn't matter. consider this example: if cnn.com made a new post/page with nothing on it but the common saying "right as rain" and a link to a website, would cnn.com and that site tank? no, of course not. even though that phrase is repeated on the web millions of times.
you need to consider your property as a whole. let's say you make a web 2.0 blog, but you don't want to slave away or spend tons of money filling it with unique content. guess what? you don't have to. if you have at least some unique content on it that's decent and readable with links to your site then you're fine. if you add a bunch of posts that's nothing but copy & pasted news stories you'll still be fine. if you add more pages with popular poems and maybe a few lines of commentary you'll still be fine. if you flood the entire property with nothing but spun garbage that makes no sense then you won't be fine.
google doesn't lay down the hammer on a site simply because it has content that's not unique. if that were true, almost every site would be destroyed on a regular basis. just think of all the news sites that post the same political quote. or repost and link to other news site's articles. they borrow content all the time.
While this is true (common phrases, quotes, even entire multi paragraphs taken rather than linked to) the main point here is the overall website.
In a highly commercial phrase Google has a lot of choice over what to rank, even how much authority to give to a WEB2 link.
While some shit slips though the net - compared to the number of very commercial terms there are it really isn't that many - and they tend to be highlighted and fixed (probably manually - but who cares how it's done)
I've had 200+ 5 page sites ranked with 100% copied content. They got blasted due to adsense issues, but they ranked real well for a long time without a single shred of unique content on them - the links were all over the place (mostly Xrumer) and the content links were copy/paste/submit. THey worked just fine.
I have other fields now where the competition is tough (ranked Medium or HIgh by Google, say 100,000 searches a month or more, or niches where page one is full of good established high traffic high PR sites. I promise you I'm not getting in there AND STAYING (which is my main criteris) with crap either on my sites or on my links. I've tried the easy way - it doesn't work.
That doesn't mean I'm white hat, far from it. Just means I had to adapt, try a few twists.
Type in "Book a winter holiday" or "European Car rental" or "Unsecured Home Loan" or "Best free to play RPG" or "Buy a moped" or whatever. There is not one shit site on page one for any of those terms. Hasn't been for years. Stick the sites in majestic or href and check out the direct links. Just about 100% decent quality. Sometimes a crap site comes onto page one - stay for anything from 6 weeks to 3 months, and is gone. Check and it's not even in the top 100 any more. It happens.
These are some of the terms I make cash on. Shit DOES NOT WORK either on site or on first tier links. PERIOD.
If you want a site like "garden kneel pads with handles" (another one of my old sites) the competition is crap. I have never written a single unique word. I spent $20 on the landing page in 2006 (as I knew nothing about the topic) scraped a few thousand words of other stuff and threw together a site. I used a bookmarking service in 2006 and have since 2009 it's had nothing but a few Xrumer profile and comment links balsts. It averages about $12 a day, never been out of the top 5 (so almost $25,000 in 6 years by my calc for nothing but junk and spam)
Unless you are lucky (or unlucky) it's "Horses for courses" ladies and gentlemen.
Horses for courses
I have few crap sites with crap content and using the same spun crap content on links and they rank well.
