Webboti's Blog (English)

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Is unique content of any relevance?

I have came across quite some posts and questions about the topic unique content. Many webmaster and newbie webmaster have heared the word unique content before and even can imagine what it might be about. But very often not everything is very clear. To remove the all the rest of the “fog” and to show what unique content is I have written this post.

Where the Internet gained its value from?

To its very basic foundation the Internet as we know it today lives next to the possibility to communicate with each other from information, that are freely available texts and media like audio and video.

Daily new content is being added by webmasters, either because they want to “say something to the world”, helping others by distributing their content or because they want to earn money.

The Monetization of the Internet

The last one is called monetization and basically means to earn some hard cold cash with websites by either selling some ad-space, promoting affiliate products or by selling own services and products.

Now there is nothing wrong, to make money with a website. No very often … it is even good that a webmaster tries to make some cash, because then he gets the necessary funding to also release more cool tools and content in future. However here comes the problem …

The Problem

Some webmaster, lets call them the lazy, want and try to make money online without actually having content or anything they give in return.

Does this work? – No, of course not, because nobody has any interest in invaluable pages.

However to go around that problem of having no content, the lazy came up with another technique. They just copy/scrape the content of other webpages.

But wait isn’t that forbidden, because my own material is copyright protected (intellectual property)?

Yes its is, but many don’t care, in fact in some cases the “lazy” could say, they just quote the content. Besides it is not possible to sue everybody that copies content, because it is done just way to often!

After all today more content is being copied and stolen everyday then ever before in history and with more powerful computers and faster networks it gets easier everyday. Small spiders and robots are build just to crawl the net and copy content.

It might be ok if spiders crawl and catch content to create something unique like price-comparison engines for example. Something unique that also helps others and gains some value to the Internet. Though it is not OK to just have a scraper copy content, then maybe automatically rewrite (by using content spinners) it a bit and then distribute it as own content.

Why is copied content bad? Isn’t it good to have content spread around multiple times?

Well it depends, but in general it can be said that it does not make sense to have the very same content listed at different places. And search engines surely don’t like it at all.

The task of search engines like google, yahoo, MSN and others is to show where relevant content to the searcher’s keyword can be found. What does a Searcher/User say when the same content is listed at 10, 20 or more spots of the search engine results? Is this going to make him happy?

No.

But the search engines want happy users, because they only make money if they have happy users that result in a lot of traffic and even more users.

That is why search engines try to do its best to deliver only relevant unique content to the user.

And that is the thing – nor the search engines neither the user has any advantage of duplicate content or a “trash-stuffed” Internet!

How to filter unique content?

Well that question is a little tricky. But one thing can be said, the process contains a lot of different parameters. One major parameter is where the content is found first (next to other parameters like authority of the site, the content is found on, etc.)

Now lets imagine a crawler copies your content, distributes it on his own page and google, yahoo or msn visits him before they visit you?

The possibility is high that his but not your content is being listed in the search engines. And with bad luck your page even gets worse rankings for other pages too, because of the duplicate content penalty.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

To make a long story short I want to emphasize that unquie content does count! And this is not just to have something unique on your page, but also to get traffic using the search engines.

How to prevent to fall in to the duplicate content penalty and how to protect your content, this will be written about in the next post.

Till then
webboti