A year or so ago I thought I had invented a new word ‘uniqueify’ turns out I had not, but it ain’t exactly common. I was writing at the time about making content, articles, on web pages appear to be unique without necessarily writing loads of new articles. It turns out that this has become something of a hot button topic.

There are only a limited number of ways that content can be uniqueified, made unique so that it is not filtered by search engine filters and thus making it more likely to be seen by search engine users. Not all the following are equally effective, I will discuss the effectiveness of the methods later.

1) Top & Tailing - adding a commentary and postscript to an article to provide genuinely useful additional content and context to an article that may have appeared in many other places. This can be automated and there are quite a few software packages around that add random but not unique top and tail paragraphs and often a middle paragraph as well.

2) Synonym substitution - here the content maker takes an article and then changes words, usually using synonyms so that the content appears to be different. This process can be done by hand using a word processr such as Open Office or MicroSoft’s Word. Over the past year we have seen software designed to make the task automatic, or semi-automatic.

3) Phrase substitution - a step up from synonym substitution and often used at the same time as an extension of the technique. Usually the phrases, sentences or even entire paragraphs are generated manually.

4) Matrix substitution - this is really a method of implementing item (3) above so that multiple copies of an article can be created. Each unit of text is assumed to fit next to the other and so version one of paragraph one can sit above version two of paragraph two. This being the case if one has 3 versions of each of three paragraphs then one can make up to 27 different and readable versions of the same article, of course the degree of uniqueness will vary, some being totally different to the original and others being almost the same.

5) Snippets - these are small pieces of text inserted either randomly or by associating theme keywords into the article. The purpose is not to make the article appear unique to the reader, for whom they stand out, but for the search engines. When well implemented they can add interest for readers, leading them further into the website. As a genuine layout technique they are effective as even if they are picked up by search engines they have a legitimate place and so are unlikely to be sanctioned by them.

6) Markov Chaining - this is a mathematical process that is designed to create real looking text, at least from the perspective of search engines. For humans this kind of text is gobbledegook although sometimes it seems to almost make sense! Here is an example of text using a well set up Markov Chain: http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/dadadodo.cgi It looks almost real, yet makes no sense and if you refresh the page you get a completely new page of text but based upon the original version. It is obvious why people generating spam pages by the million love to use this technique!

Each of these techniques has a place and some value, we will look at how and when these methods can work, and their relative merits, in a later post.

 

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