How unique does content need to be for google?

I am using Copyscrape to check my blogs posts. How unique does a posts need to be generally?


I have one page that is matching content by 66% Is that too high? If so what would be a better percentage?


Also if anyone has any suggestions on Article Spinners, or content checkers please post them.

There's a lot of misconceptions regarding a "duplicate content penalty". This is due to the fact that many discussions giving advice are regarding completely different topics that all use the same terms. Unique content and duplicate content are applied in different ways depending on the specific topic being discussed. When reading through articles and threads on the various topics, it's easy to make the mistake that they all apply universally, but that isn't the case. Whether you're better off using absolutely original content, unique content, spun content, duplicate content, or any combination of those will depend on what you're actually doing with the content.

Making sure you're articles pass copyscape is something you need to do when you're submitting articles to directories such as Associated Content, Ezinearticles, etc. Most of the better article directories won't accept duplicate content so in that situation duplicate content becomes a big issue, but that has nothing to do with Google caring about it.

Unless they receive a DMCA complaint, Google isn't really concerned about whether you're content passes copyscape. If you have 100% the same content as another site, and then you do a better job promoting the site, building backlinks, etc. then it's possible for your page to move higher than the original page in the SERP.

What google wants is for the individual pages on your website to have unique content in relationship to the other pages on the same site. The purpose of that is to prevent you from making many duplicate pages changing just the name, title, description, etc. in order to target different keywords. It's kind of a similar issue as keyword stuffing and can potentially penalize your pages.

Here are several other threads discussing the same topic in more detail:
How Does Big G treat spun articles?
What are the risks of 'spinning' content?
How does google determines duplicate content
Guide - Duplicate Content - Myths & Facts
SEO myths and reality
do any of you guys just not give a shit and blatanty copy content from wherever you want
Posting the same article to 1000's directories - good for backlinks or not?
No Such thing as duplicate content - Revealed


edit-
To answer your specific question regarding using that content in your blogs, 66% is probably fine for Google as long as you're not using it to create multiple pages all on the same domain. Depending on the purpose of your blog pages you could probably be fine even if it was less unique than that. If you wanted to use that same content to submit to top article directories then that same article would most certainly be rejected as duplicate content.

As far as creating an engaging website that'll do well in the serps, AND entice visitors to continue returning to your site and recommending it to there friends then here's a fairly decent template for doing so. Create your main website with many pages with fairly original content, you can also have a few pages with non-original content if it adds value to the overall site. Create some quality unique articles or spun articles to submit to the top article directories with backlinks to your main site. Submit those same articles after they've been accepted to the top directories and submit them to other directory sites that aren't so concerned with duplicate content with backlinks to either your main site or to the articles you made on the top directories. Choose some of those articles from your main site and some of the better ones from the article sites and submit them to multiple blog sites with backlinks to your main site and some with backlinks to the article sites. It's actually better for many of the blog and article sites to actually be exact copies with a citation giving credit to the article on your site or the article on the other directories. If you do that then you should end up with all that content getting indexed in such a way that it all leads to your main site being the authority for that content.

You can do the same thing even if you have no original content on your site. The main difference for SEO will be the fact that for duplicate content other websites are also doing basically the same thing and so you're competing with them for the same content in the index. Even in that case you can still outrank them for the same content, it'll just take a more work.

(I didn't mention all the other SEO factors and backlink building you should also do since the topic of your thread is regarding just the content.)

thanks greywolf for another great post.

My short answer is this.

In needs to be unique enough to be deemed... well unique

If you have a set of twins and one of them gets a bruise are they two completely
different people?

@Greywolf, That is by far the best response I could of asked for! Thank you!


To elaborate a little more, I have a gaming site and get alot of my content from other sites. I use a article spinner to make the content unique, before adding the post to my blog. So I was refering to google matching EXACT content from one site, to my blog...

Too bad the moderators don't make a sticky threads with great responses like greywolf's. There are so many misconceptions out there. In the end I guess it's better for me that so many people believe all the misconceptions out there.

GreyWolf said:

edit-
To answer your specific question regarding using that content in your blogs, 66% is probably fine for Google as long as you're not using it to create multiple pages all on the same domain.

Click to expand...

What do you assume in the following case:

User makes a site with 300 indexed pages just of 3 various articles. So he has spinned earch article 100 times and submitted it. Has anybody experience with that? If you have to suggest, which uniquenessrate you would take?

onthegoaudio1 said:

...To elaborate a little more, I have a gaming site and get alot of my content from other sites. I use a article spinner to make the content unique, before adding the post to my blog. So I was refering to google matching EXACT content from one site, to my blog...

Click to expand...

The fact that you get A LOT of content from other sites shouldn't be a big issue, unless the other sites have a really strong position in the SERP for that content. It isn't a matter of receiving a penalty for having the EXACT content as a page on another site, but simply a matter of whether you can outrank that other site with your page.

What you don't want to do is try creating multiple duplicate pages on a single website in an effort to rank for different keywords. For example, if you have a page about shoe brands, you don't want to create multiple copies of the same page giving each a different name like nike.htm, adidas.htm, converse.htm, etc. and then expect those pages to help you rank for the terms nike, adidas, and converse. For that type of duplicate content it can get a penalty for you're entire website. The search engines consider those to be keyword spam pages and view them in the same type of way as they do keyword stuffing on a single page.

What about creating a unique site that will engage your visitors and look good to the googlebots? Well, if you've pulled content from various other websites and reused that content on your own site, then you're site is different and unique. You're site may have varying amounts of completely original content, quoted content within your own content, and completely copied pages from other websites. You've picked and chosen information, articles, and even EXACT copies of some pages from other sites and used all those resources to create your own unique website providing your own take on all that content. You may be using duplicate content, but your website can still be unique. If you do a good enough job at it then real visitors and the search engine bots will continue visiting your site.

If you use pages from other websites and the combination of those pages on your site creates a better overall website, and provide a better mixture of keywords overall for the niche you're targeting then you're overall website can potentially do better in the SERPs than any of the sites you took the content from. If you're better at SEM/SEO/SEP than the other sites then the answer is, "yes you can outrank another existing site for an EXACT same page on your site as they have on theirs.

Hope that helps. :cool2:

To add to what greywolf just said take a look at this site:


It ranks #1 for penny stocks using a bunch of feeds from other sites that he mashes up and Google just eats it up. That site has very little unique content. In fact I think the majority of the unique content is on the home page and it's maybe 250 words.

Yeah I dont belive in Unique content too .. i guess you have to have some but its not the most imporant thing ... is all about how you mix various factors

Excellent post...Thanks for the time you put into it.

-Jericho- said:

To add to what greywolf just said take a look at this site:

Code:

http://www.thehotpennystocks.com/

It ranks #1 for penny stocks using a bunch of feeds from other sites that he mashes up and Google just eats it up. That site has very little unique content. In fact I think the majority of the unique content is on the home page and it's maybe 250 words.

Click to expand...

How would one go about "creating" content from various websites feeds? The best way I can think of would be to create a WP plugin of some sort. Hell...one might already exist.

EDIT: I guest that might be autoblogging? I've never even looked into that.

Thanks for the response's everyone. This thread is full of GREAT information. Thanks to all.

GreyWolf is right on the money. duplicate content only applies to pages within the same site.

belko002 said:

How would one go about "creating" content from various websites feeds? The best way I can think of would be to create a WP plugin of some sort. Hell...one might already exist.

EDIT: I guest that might be autoblogging? I've never even looked into that.

Click to expand...

Plenty of them already: Caffeinated Content, WP Robot and others for WP.

Scipio00 said:

What do you assume in the following case:

User makes a site with 300 indexed pages just of 3 various articles. So he has spinned earch article 100 times and submitted it. Has anybody experience with that? If you have to suggest, which uniquenessrate you would take?

Click to expand...

Man that's a good question. The scenario you just described is the exact situation in which a duplicate content penalty actually could result. I would think that if you were to create that many pages from only 3 articles with the plan of using them all for a single site then you'd want a fairly high uniqueness rate in the spun articles.

Maybe someone can give you a more specific answer, but I imagine it's going to be something you'll just have to test yourself. Maybe you can come back in a few months and post what the optimal uniqueness rate you find for that situation and what kind of results you achieve with that strategy.

Ok one more thing!

I registered a new domain name. It had recently expired and there is still active backlinks going to the domain name.

If I make new pages of my site that have the same URL as the pages that have the backlinks from the old site, Will this help me and keep the links alive?

The niche from the old site is the same as mine, so the pages would fit right in. I can also still get some of the old content from cached google pages.

Hopefully that made some since... Thanks for everyones help. I greatly appreciate it!

onthegoaudio1 said:

Ok one more thing!

I registered a new domain name. It had recently expired and there is still active backlinks going to the domain name.

If I make new pages of my site that have the same URL as the pages that have the backlinks from the old site, Will this help me and keep the links alive?

The niche from the old site is the same as mine, so the pages would fit right in. I can also still get some of the old content from cached google pages.

Hopefully that made some since... Thanks for everyones help. I greatly appreciate it!

Click to expand...

Yes, those pages will then take whatever linkjuice was being passed to them. You can either build the individual pages if you wish, or create 301s for each page to go to the home page of the site and then build out whatever you want. Choice is yours.

Good luck,

MisterGemini

Wow. So much good information. Adding to my boomarks. Thanks.

Scipio00 said:

What do you assume in the following case:

User makes a site with 300 indexed pages just of 3 various articles. So he has spinned earch article 100 times and submitted it. Has anybody experience with that? If you have to suggest, which uniquenessrate you would take?

Click to expand...

I can give an answer to that, but take it with a grain of salt as it is based only on my personal experience not on a lot of testing.

First of all, it makes no sense to target the same keyword with more than 2 pages. One would be main result and second one would be for an indented result so you get better CTR from the results page. So blasting 100 pages about the same topic makes no sense unless that site is built just for links.

Now regarding the content itself, it is imperative to have different titles. If you have two pages with same title that will affect your rankings really bad, even if the text is different.

Also, it matters how the content is different. If you have 400 words split in 4 paragraphs of which 3 are the same as on other page, that's one way. In this case having more than 50% of the text identical as the text on other page is not going to help you rank well. You may still not get a duplicate issue. Size of the text is also important. A 2000 words page with 400 words unique (20%) will do better than a 200 words page with 40 words unique.

Another way is to have all 400 words spun so that you don't have an entire paragraph exactly as on other page. So if you have the usual mambo-jumbo randomness that spinning produces, you don't have entire paragraphs being the same. Google will detect the pages are highly similar by analyzing the n-grams, but that will only tell them the content is similar as in related not as in duplicate. In this case, even with a 70% similarity, as long as the order of the sentences/paragraphs is changed both pages will appear in the SERPs, sometimes indented for each other. Other times, they are seen as duplicate. So far I was not able to figure out when and why they are seen as a complement of each other and when as duplicate. Good thing is, you can just test and if they are seen as a duplicate, you just add a bit more content and abracadabra you have two ranking pages.

All that being said, building 100 pages on the same site from just 3-4 initial articles is simply not a great idea. It is not the best way to do this. The much better approach is to take the time to make 20-25 articles and spin them with high complexity (each paragraph 2-3 times, each sentence 2-3 times, and as many synonyms as you can for the words), then just post 20-25 pages for each site, one from each original article. This way you get only 20-25 pages per site, but you can easily blast to 2000-5000 sites which could be WPMU blogs (using Link Farm Evolution for example), free blogs as WordPress (you can use XGen SEO or SENuke for this), social sites that allow content (as the ones supported by Instant Social Anarchy) and article directories (using Article Marketing Robot). If you do all those, you will basically end up with links from several thousands different domains. You may not get a site with many pages but you will get many many links and those links will have more value for your money site because they come from different domains and different IPs. Build them over the course of 4-6 months and you have got yourself a winning strategy. Ideally, if you want to spin them many times, make it so that you write the articles in such way so that except for the intro paragraph, every other paragraph can have it's order changed. This will hugely increase the number of spins you can generate while still being seen as unique enough.

MisterGemini said:

Yes, those pages will then take whatever linkjuice was being passed to them. You can either build the individual pages if you wish, or create 301s for each page to go to the home page of the site and then build out whatever you want. Choice is yours.

Good luck,

MisterGemini

Click to expand...

Thanks! I kind of remembered reading that before but wanted to double check. Does it make a difference if I make a specific page or just use a 301 redirect? I mean it doesnt matter to me (time wise) which one I do.