Unique Content is King… Or Is It?
The web is overflowing with content and every site is competing for more traffic, more conversions and more engagement, but filling your site with quality content is no easy task. As an avid reader, writer and website owner, I understand this challenge firsthand. We have all heard it from the search engines that you must have unique content or risk having your site penalized and losing rankings. In the simplest form, this is straight forward; don’t grab content from another site, put it up on yours and claim it as your own. In more technical terms, it also means don’t use the same content (original or copied) in multiple places on your site, but that is a different discussion for another time.
Some site owners also think that it’s okay to simply reword or “spin” someone else’s content to make it unique against the original text. The problem with this is sometimes it may work and sometimes it might not, but be warned, Google is getting smarter every day and many sites that do this practice are being viewed as SPAM sites which ultimately results in Google penalizing the site and rankings disappearing.
SEO is all about playing by the rules and because Google is the biggest search engine, you and I need to play by their rules. Google makes it very clear; if you want to rank, your site must use unique and have original, relevant, and compelling content. But the part that webmasters and site owners so often miss, since they are blinded by their SEO glasses, is what will satisfy my readers?
This whole concept of putting the user first was my inspiration for building the site Atar Life. My goal is to pioneer a new generation of Internet, or in a sense, getting back to basics, with the focus of putting quality, reader focused content first. Visitors today have a limited attention span and have no shortage for choice, so simply regurgitating information from another site results in users bouncing faster than ever and never coming back. I have decided that it’s time, we as website owners, editors, writers, and bloggers, must restore faith in the web by putting the customer first again by providing quality content. When we satisfy our readers, all the other marketing and business goals will fall into place naturally. The bottom line is, if you don’t look after your customers, then someone else will.
Before we answer the question of “Is unique content necessary?” let’s discuss a little more about marketing and the user experience. Every site today has some sort of conversion goal, whether you are trying to get a Facebook Like, a sale, a signup for your newsletter or as is the case with many information sites and blogs, you might be trying to get a click on an ad, such as AdSense etc. The one key factor that keeps readers on your site for longer and engaged in your site is valuable, interesting content. This commitment to your visitors, combined with good SEO practices, is what separates the good from the bad.
There is no doubt that having a truly unique, hand-written piece is best in terms of getting a page to rank but you need to think about the user first and then about SEO in order to achieve your business goals. With that said, there are however times where you can consider using syndicated content. Now before you jump up and down and say but that contradicts everything I just mentioned above and that Google will give me the “slap” for duplicate content, it’s simply not true.
The fact is, syndicated content is not duplicate content, and Google doesn’t frown on syndicated content at all so long as you stick to their very clear rules about how to use syndicated content. Here are the guidelines from Google.
With this in mind, you can often get fantastic guest posts and syndicated content for free and while you might not get all the SEO juice you so desire, you will be satisfying your readers and achieving your conversion goals.
Now let’s explore this concept even further from a completely different perspective. Instead of using syndicated content, how about being the syndication source? This means your high quality, well written, engaging content will be used by other sites. Using this approach and hand selecting some high quality, authoritative sites to give your content to, means not just a potentially great backlink (Yay for SEO!) but if you get the site owner to follow the rules of syndication and attribute the article correctly to you, there is an abundance of referred traffic to be had. Plus, don’t forget that if they have a strong social media presence, your article could get even more views and may go viral too. If you are able to get some authority sites to use and acknowledge your content, the benefits of this go beyond SEO and traffic; it makes you look like a “rock star”.
In conclusion, to answer the original question of “Is unique content necessary?” the simple answer is no. But as I explained, if you specifically want to rank a particular page on your site, then you should produce your own original unique content and if you do use it elsewhere on your own sites or other sites, then you need to make sure to use the rel=”canonical” tag. If you find an article you think your readers will enjoy, don’t try to spin it, simply publish it as is, acknowledge the source and again use the rel=”canonical” tag, sit back and enjoy the benefits. Finally, if you want to get more traffic with less concern about SEO but without harming your site, then produce some high quality reading and share it with a select few high authority sites.
Play by the rules, and remember, the customer is king…
