Private Label Rights Articles: Why Pay For The Same Content Others Have

At first glance, Private Label Rights (PLR) articles seem like a sound investment. If you believe the hype, they allow you to have fresh, exciting content that will drive the search engines – and the masses – to your website.

But take a little bit of a closer look at Private Label Rights articles and the sites that provide them. They tell you upfront that their articles are on specific topics. They tell you up front that they limit the number of people – other website owners like you who are looking for content for their sites – who can buy the article, but in most cases, the limit is to two hundred people.

Sounds alright – at first. But then take an even closer look. The sites tell you that you can use the PLR article with minimal editing. All you need to do is change a few words and add your byline.

If all two hundred people who buy that Private Rights Label article make minimal changes – some of which are sure to be duplicates of changes that you would make – what happens is this: one article gets attributed to all two hundred individuals.

In the best of cases, no one will notice: after all, with all of the web sites that are available, what are the chances of someone stumbling upon two sites with the same PLR article? Honestly, those chances aren't that great: it's unlikely.

However, your luck will not be as good with the search engines like Google and Yahoo and others. The marketers of Private Label Rights articles would like you to believe that the content will drive web traffic to your site. They talk about keywords. They talk about niche marketing.

The services that provide Private Label Rights articles want you to believe that the process is simple. They tell you to buy a PLR article or group of articles; to paste the content from that article into your web site. Once pasted, you add a title to the page and make a few changes, add a link and you will be ready to submit your page to the search engines.

It should be obvious, when they tell you to make changes to the article, that you're getting the same content that others are getting. And, it should be cause for alarm – or at least questioning – when you read on some sites that, to make the content look more like your own you should add misspellings to the document.

While very few of the sites would encourage you to use the article as is, they don't give you the full reason. The marketers and salespeople at those sites will tell you that you shouldn't use the articles as is because they will lack your personality.

The real reason why they tell you not to use the article as it is written is a much bigger deal. The real reason is that the search engines look for original content when it comes to ranking results. Private Label Rights articles, no matter what changes you make to them simply do not register with the search engines as original content.

That does not mean, of course, that you are obligated to write your own original content. It only means that you owe it to yourself and your business to be sure that you have original content for your website.

One way of getting original content for your site is to hire a content producing service to write your articles and blog entries or even ebooks for you. Rather than purchasing the same packet of text that others by, you can have a custom created text that's just for your site and that will not be re-sold to anyone else.

Which would you prefer: original content that will only appear on your site or content that will also be used by somewhere between fifty and three hundred other websites?

The choice should be clear: original content is imperative when you want to market your site and the products or services that your company offers. PLR articles are not original content; why would you choose to market your product with inferior content?