Unique content - the pile ‘em high approach
Unique content is critical for the prosperity, nay, the survival of any long term website. Sugarrae has an excellent post on the topic, which inspired me to comment (in the pre-blog days), and now to take up and expand on what I said.
At the time, I was of the opinion that linkage data was all, and while that kind of ties into Raes thesis (conceptually unique content can be a link driver), it doesn’t address something else I see - that literally unique content can do the business too.
I think we both missed something at that time - whilst literally unique content may actually have zero intellectual value, and be unlikely to garner quality links, that might not matter… Sometimes, SEOs have a tendency to think in terms of high competiton, 2 word generic phrases, where ranking is tough, and linkage data really is whats needed. But there’s more to SEO than owning a term like “online poker” or “buy viagra”. Sometimes you can do as well, or better by grabbing top spots for a whole load of longer, more specific terms (a concept known as the “long tail” for the uninitiated).
Since the competition is much less in long tail terms, just having a few even halfway OK links can be enough to supply some authority to a domain (or using a good expired domain if you prefer), at least enough to match the other low-authority domains you are likely to be competing against, and all of a sudden the onpage content starts to matter.
This is where you can get tricky. Those rather low-rent article rewriting tactics suddenly start to have an effect. Lots of wannabe blackhats will just spot an article they like, or send out a bot to scrape some content, plug it into their favourite auto-gen software, and crank out some pages. Doing some minor mods to the article first can produce results. Even reordering the paragraphs without otherwise changing the text can be enough. Remember, when you’re dealing with low level SEO, even the smallest improvement can make a difference.
If your article is 50 words longer than the original, and targets the keyphrase correctly, it can outrank the original - just taking some of the original copywriters alternative phrases out, and keyword stuffing a few extra instances of your targetted term can make your version seem more “relevant” to a search engine. Spiders have a reading age equivalent to that of an earthworm, so take advantage. You’re not up for the Booker Prize, you just want the search engine to see YOUR version of the article as the “best”.
Sure, it’s unlikely to work for the competitive terms - but that doesn’t matter, right? You may well be able to produce 20 of these “relevant” articles in a day - that’s 100 hundred “quality”, ranking pages in a week. Once the site starts to gain rankings, you can even start rewriting some of the content (or just add some more) targetting new terms that your log analysis (you DO analyse your log data right?) throws up, and start cross linking pages not just across the site, but across your network of sites for that “natural linking pattern” look.
It’s not as easy as pushing the button - but that’s its’ beauty. Everyone does “easy”. Don’t be everyone.