A plr service produces a certain number of articles and even full-length ebooks every month for its subscribers. The articles are available to all the subscribers and they have the right to publish the material on their websites or elsewhere. The idea is that plr articles enable Internet marketing start-ups to build content quickly and are an option that many busy website owners are keen to use to add content to their sites under their own names. Plr ebooks may also be republished under the subscribers own name and marketed as new products or offered as incentives to visitors to sign up for their newsletters.

These features are said to give plr users extra credibility and make it more likely that a visitor will return to their site, or even go so far as to buy something.

However, remember at the beginning I asked "What are the pitfalls to be avoided"?

Well, there is just one pitfall, but it is a rather LARGE one that must be negotiated before you rush off to sign up with a plr publisher and start posting articles to your site.

That there pitfall is called "dooplicate content."

Always remember: Gooogle just hates doooplicate content.

If you publish an article without making any changes to it, it will be identical to numerous articles found on many other sites. Your article will therefore be rated as "duplicate content" by the search engines.

The reason for this is that search engines aim to present their users with material that is useful, unique and relevant to their search terms. So, if 100 subscribers of a plr publisher simply paste and post the same articles on their sites, search engines that lack a "duplicate content" filter would turn up 100 identical articles for their users. As someone who probably searches for stuff on search engines, you can imagine how pleased a user would be with the results of their search if the first ten pages turned up identical sites! A search engine that did not filter duplicate content would soon go out of business as searchers would avoid it like the plague.

If you plan to use plr content, first check out how many other sites are using the same article before you publish it. You can easily do that by copying a sentence from the article straight into a search engine. Place inverted commas around it to narrow the search down to that exact string only. You'll probably discover that as many as 100 or more sites have already beaten you to it and published the article.

If, on the other hand, you find just a handful of articles, and if it is a Google search you are conducting, don't jump to the conclusion that your article is still quite fresh and new... Look out at the bottom of the listings for Google's duplicate content message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

The last part of that sentence links to the full search results and you will almost certainly find many many more copies of the same article have been published.

So, is there a way to get your plr articles out there without suffering any penalties?

Yes, there is, but there are some steps you must take first. Here they are.

1. Make sure you write your own unique title for the article.

2. Write a unique opening paragraph for the article.

3. Sorry, but you also need to rewrite large chunks of the second, third and probably fourth paragraphs too. Actually, once you get used to the process it is not so difficult. Read a few sentences at a time, then rephrase them, turn them around and mix them up.

4. Write your own closing paragraph.

You will now have four to six paragraphs that are in your own words and that are therefore very unlikely to be counted as duplicate content.

Just how much of the article you rewrite is up to you. The more your rewrite and, the more changes you make, the more original the article will appear to both the search engines and your site's visitors.

Well, you may ask, by the time I've done all that I could have written an original article from scratch. Of course, if you can write articles from scratch that is to be encouraged, and indeed, even if you use plr articles, you should still aim to write at least some articles entirely by yourself.

You will find that writing your own article takes longer than reworking a plr article, however. Plr articles can be rewritten in just a few minutes once you have got used to the process, so they save you a lot of writing time - and they also save you many hours of research.

Used properly, therefore, plr articles are a valuable tool in increasing both your personal productivity and your presence on the Internet.