Hello,

I am a journalist with a sideline in SEO copywriting and I have a question I hope you SEO experts can help me with.

While I create ghostwritten blog posts which naturally contain keywords and strive to add value to a site and encourage inbound links, I notice a growing number of companies are simply creating unique content which is still a rehash of existing content.

For example, there has been a considerable rise in firms summarising popular blog posts etc but doing so in a way which ensures the words they use are unique and not quite plagiarism, with the original blog posts being fully cited.

So, here is my question: Does this kind of content help? Obviously it is not going to build inbound links but is simply having regularly updated keyword rich content enough to climb rankings?

What I suppose I am asking is whether or not I should be also offering this watered-down copywriting service? It would certainly be easier than the content I create at present.

Does Google still care about unique content or is it, as I thought, all about inbound links?

All information gratefully received!

Felicity

Journalist and SEO copywriter

fliss_kingevans@hotmail.com

hi, Felicity, how are you?

I'm going to totally ignore all benefits other than SEO in this answer. There are a ton of benefits of extra content other than SEO, but I guess (as a writer) you're bought into most of that!

Does Google still care about unique content or is it, as I thought, all about inbound links?

It's a bit of both. The ultra-simplified version is, you will rank first for a particular search term if:

1. A page on your site is deemed most relevant or equally relevant for that term.
2. AND Your page is trusted more than your competitors' for that search term.
3. AND Your page is deemed to be distinct, or the original in the case of duplicates.

(Note they all say 'page' & not 'site'.)

What that means is: If you don't have the unique content, you can't rank for it.

An Extreme Example

An example of a place where just the existence of the unique content counts way more than the page's potential to generate inbound links would be a big news site.

The editor puts in a call to the seo/content team: "Somali Pirates are big this week guys & I'm not seeing any Somali traffic hitting the sites yet. We need to own this in Google. What can we do?"

They know that they can't drive enough external links in a short enough time ('today') to get them there. And, as the story will be gone in 2 months, there's no point in trying to grab a bunch of 'somali pirates' inbound links to own the phrase long-term. Instead they do something like this:

1. Look for existing content on the site that they can bundle up into an entity (page/set of pages/subsection) that would be considered relevant for 'Somali Pirates'.
2. Failing that, put up some new content about Somali Pirates (maybe very similar in message to every other somali pirates news article on every other news site, but technically unique).
3. Use their existing trust from Google to flow trust to their new Somali Pirates page. They could do this by pointing links from various existing trusted pages within their sites (eg. their homepage(s), subsections, trusted ocean-related articles, partner sites).

Of course that's just an artificial version of what often happens naturally: Category pages are linked from homepages, article pages are linked from categories, and the pagerank all flows naturally.

An Analogy

A nice way to think about it is a shopping centre with a helpful guide at the entrance. He cares about 2 things related to your shop: 1) The number & importance of people who say "hey, Felicity's shop's really great" - this is your inbound links. 2) The list of products you sell that he knows about - this is your unique content.

Hope that helps - let me know if so.

dan

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http://www.barker.dj

Duplicate content filters are found in the search engines. Internet has the standard tool known as crawler. This tool helps in filtering information so that it can be relevant for the users. There are instances where in spammers use tricks so that the key phrase will not be determined by the crawler. Thus, we writers need to secure the articles that we are doing. Writing good quality articles is a hard thing to do so we have to protect it from spammers. There are several ways to avoid duplicate contents. First is by creating spun articles.