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One of the biggest challenges of developing a website is creating content. Even if you type at a rate of 70 words per minute (WPM) or faster, you may struggle to produce a sufficient amount of content for your website. As a result, you may feel compelled to use private label rights (PLR) articles. While PLR articles will allow you to quickly and easily fill your website with content, you should think twice before using them.
What Are PLR Articles?
Also known as white label articles, PLR articles are articles sold to multiple customers with non-exclusive rights. Customers who buy them are typically allowed to use, modify or even resell the articles as their own. For example, suppose you buy a set of PLR articles (often sold in bulk, ranging anywhere from 10 to 10,000 articles).
In that case, you can publish them on your website or elsewhere under your name and without crediting the original author. The only restriction is that you cannot claim copyright with most PLR articles.
The non-exclusive nature of PLR articles means multiple web admins may buy and use the same articles on their websites. As a result, it’s not uncommon for vendors to sell the same PLR articles to hundreds of customers.
Granted, some vendors limit the number of customers to whom they sell their PLR articles, whereas others sell their PLR articles to an unlimited number of customers. Regardless, though, all PLR articles are sold to multiple customers, so they usually appear on numerous websites.
Low Relevancy
Because PLR articles are sold in bulk, some of them may not be relevant to your website. You can buy sets of PLR articles related to a specific industry, such as automotive, landscaping, retail, or health.
Still, the broad nature of these categories can result in some of your purchased articles being irrelevant. And if a piece isn’t aligned with the rest of the content on your website, you shouldn’t use it.
Furthermore, you can’t specify a topic or topics when purchasing PLR articles. If you want an article covering a specific topic, you should search elsewhere for your website’s content.
Low Quality
When outsourcing your website’s content, the adage “You get what you pay for” rings true. PLR articles are inexpensive, but it shows in their quality.
They often suffer from misspellings, grammatical errors, incoherent sentence structures, and poor readability. Your website’s content is a representation of its brand.
Visitors will associate it with your website’s brand if it’s filled with low-quality, error-ridden PLR articles.
Duplicate Content
The biggest issue with PLR articles is that they’re considered duplicate content by search engines. According to Google, 30 percent of all online content is published on multiple pages, meaning duplicate content.
You can publish small amounts of content, such as brand slogans or legal jargon, on multiple pages of your website without ill effect. However, if your website contains the same PLR articles found on other websites, it won’t perform well in the search results.
The indexing algorithms used by search engines generally avoid indexing multiple pages featuring large blocks, or articles, of the same content.
Instead, the first page to publish the content is often indexed, whereas any additional pages that post the same content are not indexed.
Sometimes, Google will deem the most relevant and authoritative website for ranking, passing on the others.
Unless you’re first the customer who buys and publishes a PLR article online, it’s probably already indexed in the search results, in which case it won’t attract any organic traffic.
If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.
Source: developers.google.com
Plagiarism
Unintentional plagiarism is also a concern when using PLR articles. When you buy a set of PLR articles, you may assume the vendor of those articles is also the original author.
Sometimes the person or business that creates PLR articles will sell their articles. In other instances, the original author may sell their PLR articles to another person or company who resells them for a profit. With PLR articles going through so many different hands, the risk for plagiarism is high.
Before reselling a set of PLR articles, a nefarious vendor may add copyright-protected articles to make them more valuable and, therefore, sell them at a higher price.
Unfortunately, each unsuspecting customer who buys and uses the copyright-protected articles plagiarizes the original author’s work.
Although it’s not intentional plagiarism, it still infringes upon the author’s copyrights, which could spell legal trouble for your website.
I use Grammarly to check for plagiarism before publishing an article.
Choose Articles with Exclusive Rights
You can still outsource the creation of your website’s content, but you should consider purchasing and using articles with exclusive rights rather than PLR articles.
Articles with exclusive rights are sold to a single customer, allowing you to avoid problems like low relevancy, duplicate content, and plagiarism.
Many authors who sell exclusive rights articles are also open to requests. If you buy an exclusive rights article and are satisfied with its quality, you can contact the author to request another article on your desired topic.
As you forge a professional relationship with the author, you can easily source high-quality content in a consistent voice and style for your website.
The low cost of PLR articles can make them enticing. After all, where else can you get articles for less than $1 apiece? But it would help if you considered the impact those articles will have on your website’s performance.
With their non-exclusive nature, PLR articles won’t help your website succeed. Of course, you can expect to pay more for exclusive rights articles, but it’s a wise investment that your website will reflect in performance.
Check out Constant Content, a platform where you can buy unique content with exclusive rights.
In Closing,
At one time, PLR articles worked for ranking on Google. Today, original content is essential. While PLR articles are cheap, and easy to come by, your version most likely won’t rank on Google. If it’s SEO you are after, pass on this type of content.
FAQ
A PLR article is a pre-written piece of text that’s been published under someone else’s name, usually as part of a larger collection of articles. A PLR article is often sold through online stores such as Amazon, but can also be found elsewhere on the internet.
If your focus is on SEO, then PLR articles are not good due to the fact that they are duplicated in mass volume.
Private Label Rights refer to content that is written specifically for a particular market. It is typically written by authors who are either professional writers or students who are learning how to write.
Lori Ballen is a real estate agent in Las Vegas. She’s a digital marketing specialist, speaker, and marketing coach and loves to share her “Ballen Method” to generate website traffic and leads online. Lori’s specialties are SEO content writing (ranking on the search engines), social media strategies, and affiliate marketing. Need a website? Contact Lori’s brothers Jeff and Paul Helvin at Ballen Brands.
