You are a unique individual. No matter how high and mighty, no one is more unique than you. Not Angelina Jolie, not Barack Obama, not the Incredible Hulk. Unique is an absolute, as most of us learned in high school English. Meaning there is no such thing as most unique, almost unique or any other shading.
That is unless you're a Google engineer.
Web search and traffic analytics operate with two "unique" concepts -- "unique visitors" and "unique content." Put simply, the more of these the better.
Unique visitors (aka absolute unique visitors) -- slanged down to "uniques" -- refers to the number of people who land on an Internet property in a given period, throwing out all repeat visits. Someone who calls up a site 10 times counts the same as another person who visits once.
The other major measure is total page views, a raw number that makes Web publishers happy because it's always higher. Both of these measurements come in and out of fashion with advertisers and others keeping score.
(If you publish a web site or blog, Google Analytics should be your traffic tracker. It's free and it's remarkable. Google now links AdSense with the Analytics, a vaguely creepy concept that makes the data even more robust.)
The other "unique" -- unique content -- represents a trickier concept. Google and the other search engines value original content over pretty much anything other than high-quality incoming links.
No one outside Google seems to know for sure, but the percentage of original content needed for a Web page to score as unique seems to be 65 percent to 70 percent. That gap allows for incidental repurposing of content such as blockquotes of cited passages or widely distributed quotes from press releases.
The flip side of this is duplicate content, sometimes a bad or very bad thing. At best, the publishing of duplicate content is no apparent help for those trying to lure traffic. Google and the other search engines seek to present content on its source page.
(Unfortunately, most people experienced in writing for the Web have horror stories about some scraper -- automated thief -- outranking them with their own work. There are remedies for content larceny, including contacting Google legal. I've done this successfully.)
My clients often struggle with the concept of unique content. Cutting and pasting material from several sources, for example, does not constitute original content. As the teacher used to say, you have to do your own work. And then present it in one place.
When clients send me text for a Web page or post, I always run a Yahoo! search on several of the sentences. Frequently, there are matches, meaning the content has been duplicated and thus already has been indexed in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
In general, this makes the "new" content worthless in terms of SEO. In extreme cases, copied content leads to search engine penalties. (Some SEOs say the duplicate content penalty is a myth.) Then there are the copyright violations, meaning possible legal problems. The Associated Press, for example, recently declared war on bloggers who dupe their news.
But the issue of duplication is not purely one of right and wrong -- even with permission from the creators, serial use of duplicate content can lead to wheel spinning or worse. Duplication of your own work remains duplication, even if the readers are being served. Remember that the Web revolves around links, not republishing.
Many writers build their site's authority and traffic by syndicating content on the Web. This is almost never a problem, even if you repeat the content on your own site. Google and the rest recognize this as a legitimate form of content distribution. Just don't count on your site getting credit for the work in the SERPs -- and don't be surprised if the ranking goes to another site.
Another point: Unique content does not mean unique topics, ideas or conclusions. Facts cannot be copyrighted. This is basically a matter of original wording, presentation and style.
Experts in search engine optimization universally agree that relevant unique content is the No. 1 element leading to success in terms of traffic, readership loyalty and ad dollars.
Unique content is king.
