Private Label Articles: Part 2 - Pitfalls

Today we continue the series on private label rights (PLR) articles. Please read Part 1 before continuing.

As I mentioned previously, the newfound popularity of private label articles can be directly attributed to the increasing number of AdSense and YPN publishers looking to make money via search engine and social bookmarking traffic. The latter traffic generation method is particularly favored for quick returns via “tag and ping” and PLR articles are a favorite source of content for that.

The popularity of PLR articles brings us directly to the first pitfall of using the articles: content duplication. Unless you get exclusive rights to the content, there's no way for you to know how many other people are using the same articles. With the search engines placing greater emphasis on duplicate content exclusion, this means that your pages can get pushed out of the indexes if too many other sites are republishing the same articles. This is why every PLR seller will advise you to rewrite the articles in some form. And they'll happily sell you tools to help you rewrite the content, too…

Here's a quick way to check if an article you've received has been overused. Go to MSN search and do a phrase search for a few phrases you've pulled out of the article. (The reason we're using MSN here instead of Google is that pages get into MSN more quickly and as such MSN is a favored target for content spammers.) For example, I have on my computer a set of PLR articles I got for free from a mailing list. I choose one at random called “BadCredit.doc”. I look in it and find this phrase at the beginning of the third paragraph:

When you are looking for home loans with bad credit you will probably want to look into what is called a subprime loan.

I place quotes around the phrase and do an MSN search for it: here, try it yourself (opens new window). Hmm. Four results. Try it with Yahoo!. Seven results. And Google. Five results.

Well, that's not as bad as it could have been, but obviously there are other people out there using the same article.

More disturbing, however, is if you look closely at the results, you'll see that most of the articles are posted with someone's name. Look here, for example.

And this is where things get murky. It's another pitfall. Private label rights let you put your own name on articles. So you can submit them to article directories and such as your own work if you want to. (Many directories forbid this from happening, of course, but there's no way for them to tell.) But how do you know that the article was originally written by someone else, stripped of the bio information, and then sold as a PLR article? What's worse, once an article is released in PLR form, like a virus it starts to infect other PLR packages. There are many PLR sites that give you permission to resell the articles you get in your own PLR collections. (Some do, some don't — again, it's a real patchwork of rights trying to figure out what you can do and can't so.) So a PLR vendor who buys work from other PLR vendors may be compounding a copyright infringement. I don't honestly know whether the article I just mentioned was a legitimate PLR article submitted under someone's name or else a copyrighted article stripped of bio information. All I have is the PLR vendor's word for it.

Finally, there are writing issues. PLR articles, like all articles, vary widely in quality. And in size. And in tone. You must take the time to read each and every article and make sure it's up to snuff if you plan on associating your name with it.

Next we'll talk about what I think you should be doing with PLR articles.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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