Heavenly SEO Practices: Unique Content

The concept of unique content is inextricably linked to the issue of duplicate content. Duplicate content, even the most inexperienced of internet marketers will know, is a big no-no – even if the exact rules (and what qualifies as duplicate content) are a little blurred. Yet everyone knows that duplicate content is to be avoided if at all possible, so the phrase ‘unique content’ gets bandied about as the savior.

Yet what is duplicate content? It very much depends on your definition. For some, perhaps less experienced or professional internet marketers, unique content is simply a catch-all term that means any content that won’t receive a flag in a program such as CopyScape. That can mean that the content of the article (such as “how to build a doll house”) is exactly the same, only the words of the article are rearranged to appear in a different order, and thus pass CopyScape

Is that really unique content though? Probably not. Unique content, in the truest meaning of the word, is something that is truly unique. Something that has been written from scratch, by a human being, which imparts a previously undiscovered knowledge or opinion. That is the true meaning of unique content, and it’s websites that feature this kind of information that rank well in search engines.

Of course, if you’re working within a much written about niche, it’s hard to keep finding groundbreaking information to refer to continually. So perhaps the truth of unique content is somewhere in between the two extremes; content that is freshly written for the specific website by a human being, that may cover old ground, but at least does it in a useful and well written way.