Private Label Articles (PLR) services swarm the woodwork. You’d see a merchant offering 200 articles for $50 or 1000 for $99. They promise you how it saves time and gives your readers valuable information.

There’s a heavy price beyond the dollar tag though: duplication.

You buy a PLR package of, say, forex tips and post the articles all over your site. You sit back and expect readers to come. But none come. It turns out that every other webmaster and his dog posted the same articles on their own sites.

Now readers are confused. They wonder how come the same article is all over the web under differnt authors. Your credibility suffers.You’re perceived a shady fly-by-night. And worse…. Google penalizes you for duplicate content. Pretty soon, a few pages of your drop off the rankings into the supplementary results.

Don’t believe me? A friend of mine dropped from the rankings to the 80th results page because he inserted unedited PLRs all over his site. There was little original content other than the product descriptions.

Zero traffic, zero customers. He’s closing shop.

Content is still king. Be unique!