Highena

All SEO experts agree that the cornerstone of good search engine optimisation is having unique content. Copying content from elsewhere on the web not only infringes copyright it harms your site’s ranking. Imagine if there was a tool that turned copied content into unique pages in the eyes of the search engines.

There is one such plugin for WordPress that does this. It’s called Uniquifier.

What Uniquifier does is place snippets of code into the source code of your web page, making it look totally original to the search engines, yet still reads the same in browsers. If you were to run this alongside another WordPress plugin that scrapes rss feeds from other sites (think wp-o-matic or Feed WordPress), in theory you can have hundreds of original web pages up and running in a very short time.

Sounds great doesn’t it? Thousands of pages quickly indexed all looking totally original. Yeh, until Google cottons onto it (if they haven’t already). It won’t take long till there spiders will be able to root out the sites using this plugin and penalize them heavily.

Available for $14.99, the uniquifier seems an absolute bargain, but in my opinion a waste. It’s only a matter of time till it fails. Google, and other search engines, want their users to have the best possible browsing experience, not pages and pages of the same rehashed text. They will not tolerate duplicate content.

The wp-o-matic and Feedwordpress plugins do have legitimate uses but are made to look rather unethical when there is the Uniquifier on sale to run alongside it.

The developer of Uniquifier made a recent post on Sitepoint forum defending the plugin:

Hello there,
I am goscript, the author of the Uniquefier Plugin.
Someone brought this thread to my attention so here I am to clarify some aspects.
Firstly: Does it works? Yes it does.
Despite the fact that the plugin uses a not so complicated method, the results are positive. The are almost 3 months since I firstly released a version of it, since then all pages using Uniquefier are passing both Copyscape and are unique content in Google index (no page goes in duplicate).
Will this work forever? This is something I cannot give an answer to as search engines algorithms can change any time. I myself know this method for years (4-5 at least). Since then it’s working.
Secondly: This is not a tool that encourages copyright theft.
Everyone chooses how to use it. Some use it because they own several blogs and want to be able to write just one article and publish in all of them without fearing of being penalized for dupe. Others use it because they use free PLR articles, again, the Uniquefier will be a benefit to them. Some people may choose, as it has been specified also in this thread, to use it in conjunction with scrapping tools and so on which will lead them to copyright infringement.
Everyone is free to select their way of using it, both positive or negative. If they choose the positive way, good for them, if they not, they can suffer hard consequences.
In conclusion, you cannot blame Uniquefier for being the tool that leads to copyright infringement. Uniquefier will not copy+paste articles into your blog, you will do this. Should we blame WordPress too? As the Uniquefier cannot exist without WordPress.
In short, Uniquefier is just a tool that will make your wordpress posts look unique in search engines eyes.
Cheers, goscript

You can read the full thread here.

It’s interesting to see what ethics the majority of other internet users have.