Having read hundreds of debates around PLR articles and the duplicate content google hammer I decided to test the issue for myself and proceeded to set up a website to test the theory, the results will probably surprise you.

A Thought on Monetizing PLR Articles

The question I wanted to answer was quite simple, can PLR articles rank without being rewritten, I will admit that I already had an answer in mind before starting out and merely wanted to confirm it for myself. In my experience duplicate content can rank but this needed to be confirmed so I went ahead and settled on a niche, registered the domain, wrote 5 unique articles, added 20 PLR articles which I did not rewrite or alter in any way and took care of all my on site SEO. I followed my standard formula for new websites;

Day 1:

  • Submitted my sitemaps to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
  • Verified myself as the owner on WOT
  • Took care of the directory submissions I deem worthwhile
  • Submitted to ~2000 website evaluation sites
  • Pinged all and sundry

Day 2:

  • Created 50 profile backlinks
  • Created Squidoo Lens
  • Created Hubpage
  • Submitted Articles
  • Did not ping (NB)

Day 3

  • Blog Commenting
  • Forum Commenting
  • Did not ping (NB)

By the second day pages were already appearing in the index but it was only by the 4th day that the PLR pages started showing up in the index, I waited another 10 days before checking up on the site again and found that only 2 of the pages had not been indexed so I built some back links to those specific pages and they were indexed shortly afterwards.

So with all the pages indexed it was time to look at the ranking situation, I had picked a fairly competitive niche but I would be happy with a top 20 ranking. I spent another 4 days building links and doing some article promotion and decided to leave it at that for another month before looking at the site again at which point it ranked 19th for the primary keyword.

Now this may not entirely prove or disprove any arguments about duplicate content but it certainly does raise some interesting questions, and no I will not disclose the site since it will just attract jealous sabotaging punks and yes the site is already generating income in fact it made its first dollar on the 4th day it was live.