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One question that seems to go round and round the SEO world is the question of unique content…

More specifically, is unique content necessary to get a web site ranked well at the search engines? And if so, how much unique content is needed?

100 words? 200 words? 300 words? 500 words? More?

This is an ongoing argument between SEO professionals who tend to focus on more blackhat methods and the people who tend to lean more towards white or grey hat techniques.

The blackhatters will argue that you don’t need any unique content. Just throw up some constantly updating RSS feeds to pipe in content over time, or pull some free articles from an article directory; maybe spin them, maybe post them as is…

Are they right? Well…Yeah…sort of.

It’s true that you can get a site indexed with non-unique content. The question become “how well can you get ranked?” and “for how long can you stay ranked?”.

The problem with most blackhat techniques is that they very rarely last over the long term. Sure you can build a crappy site with spun or non-unique content and get ranked for a while. But sooner or later Google will slap your site right out of the index.

That doesn’t bother a lot of blackhatters because those sites are so easy to build using automated software that they can simply make another one…or hundreds of other ones. If each site brings in a few dollars a day in adsense or CPA income for a few weeks before getting banned, then they’re happy.

But what if you’d rather build something solid, that will last? How much unique content is needed?

That’s a question that needs to be answered and one I haven’t seen answered to my satisfaction.

The common sense answer is that each page of your site should have as much unique content as possible. People tend to put that level at around 500 words. More than that is even better. That’s not really a scientific answer, just the common prevailing opinion.

The problem is one of trade-offs, time, and money.

To build a site that pulls in good income (either via adsense, ebay listings, Amazon affiliate listings, or some CPA offer) you need to have both a lot of unique content, but also a lot of external links pointing towards your site so that you can dominate the top rankings at the search engines.

After all, the more content you have, the more long tail keyword traffic you’re going to pick up from the search engines.

So as a web site developer, you have to balance your time between building content, and getting links.

It’s that balancing act that can destroy a business. Spend too much time building content, and you won’t get ranked well enough at the search engines because you won’t have spent enough time on link building.

Some people solve this problem by outsourcing either content creation or link building. Both have potential problems that I won’t get into in this article.

Suffice it to say, the solution seems to be “write as little content as possible so that you don’t piss off Google, and spend the rest of your time building links”.

Which brings us back to our original question…

Like I said, I’ve not ever had this answered to my satisfaction. I know from building hundreds of my own web sites that 500 words (give or take) per web page seems like the sweet spot, but that’s just a general “feeling” I’ve sort of come to rely on. Is it correct?

I’ve decided to run a test, and post the results here.

The test will be simple. I’ll create 4 web sites, each with 5 pages of content (in addition to the normal about-us, contact-us, and privacy-policy pages). For each web site I’ll build content pages with the same amount of words.

• Site one: 100 words of content per page
• Site two: 200 words of content per page
• Site three: 300 words of content per page
• Site five: 500 words of content per page

Each web site will have it’s own domain, which will be an exact match domain.

Each web site will be built around a main keyword that gets around 3,000 unique monthly local searchers as noted in the Google keyword tool.

Each web site will have as close to 30,000 other competing web sites already on the subject as possible.

Each web site will have a similar design and layout.

I’ll build all the sites at the same time, all with their full content already written, and deploy them each on the same day. I’ll add them to Google Webmaster Tools all at the same time as well.

For link building, every week I’ll write one 400-500 word article per site and submit it to Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, and ArticleBase.com with two links to each specific site in the author resource box of the article.

I’ll then follow their results weekly for the next two months in the SERPs, posting each week their results – right here in the SEO Case-Study section of my site.

It might not be an exhaustive experiment, but it should shed some light on this subject once and for all! It should be very interesting!

If you have any suggestions or ideas about this case-study, please post a comment below.