I’m sure you’ve heard a hundred times that content is King or that you must have unique content if you want to rank high in Google. I’ve probably even said it before on this blog. But today I’m telling you that it’s all a lie. Sites with zero unique content can still rank high in Google.

Take a look at this Brady Quinn fan site (not one of my sites). The entire front page of information is composed of reworded content from Quinn’s wiki page. The owner of this site just changed a few words here or there. But read through it… it’s the exact same content and nothing unique at all.

Then 90% of the rest of the content on this site is syndicated news from sites like Yahoo Sports or Cleveland.com. None of those syndicated articles are unique either.

This site ranks #2 in Google for “Brady Quinn”. He probably gets 500-700 uniques/day during the offseason and 1,500 or more uniques/day during football season. So how does he rank so high for a competitive keyword with zero unique content? LINKS! The site has a lot of links pointing back to it.. and these are links from unique IPs (I checked).

So there you have it. It’s not ground-breaking news. Links are more important then content. Next time you’re stuck and your site won’t rank any higher… stop adding content to it and start adding links.