Comment on SEO Silo Theme by SEO Dave.

SEO Silo Structure In a perfect SEO world ALL your content would be unique, but as we all know generating unique content takes TIME and EFFORT, makes taking shortcuts tempting.

If you decide to take shortcuts and use duplicate content the question then is how much not completely unique content can you get away with?

The Private Network SEO Test Comment is a respun version of the Warrior Forum post I made, but with a lot of changes and I did write both items of content, so no issues with copyright (though Google’s automated checks won’t know that though). Take into account the Warrior Forum version is about 5-10% of the Warrior Forums web pages content and my comment version is well over 50%. Even so to be safe I made changes.

Public domain content : no limit at all, you have as much right to use public domain works as anyone else. So if you add public domain content Google shouldn’t have an issue with it, but you’ll find plenty of other webmasters have the same idea (lots of competition).

If you aren’t changing the content at all you are pretty much competing on off-page SEO. If you are smart about it, you do change the content, that could be say a public domain book with no content changes (you can’t really change the content of a classic novel by Charles Dickens say for SEO reasons :-)), but you allow comments and the comments are unique.

Thin affiliate content : though you have the right to use the content (no copyright issues), Google doesn’t like thin affiliate sites, so they are out to downgrade them. The trick is to make thin affiliate duplicate content not thin, there’s comparison sites that add user value to thin content by comparing prices/products. Others that add unique user reviews, with thin affiliate content it’s about adding value others haven’t added to the same content.

Respun content : make enough changes and it’s unique. When you think about it, if you read an article online and decide to write a similar article, it’s copying the concept, but not the actual content – Google won’t have an issue (pretty obvious).

Take a copyright piece of content and respin it, really depends how well you respin the content. Although you can make a respun article pass Copyscape etc… is it really unique? How much of this duplicate content can you get away with? I can usually tell if an article I’m reading has been respun, tends to be poorly written.

It’s about how much risk are you willing to take. Perfect SEO world, take no SEO risks.

What you described about using news articles as comments did sound risky.

A derivative of the concept could be take short snippets of news articles AND add unique content discussing the news articles. I’ve occasionally done this as a starter for an article, will read something on a forum etc… and post a bit of it and answer questions etc… to fill the content out. More the content is unique the better, it’s not a quick way to generate content though, still takes time.

IME anything that generates quick content that’s from significantly duplicated copyright material is doomed to fail long term.

David