08 Aug Content Curation
Many people were initially excited by the idea of placing a content curation tool on their business website to help expand their digital marketing. These tools would allow you to automatically take curated content and post it to your website.
Sounds too good to be true, and in this case it is.
What is Content Curation?
Let’s back up a step if you are unfamiliar with the term content curation. It is the process by which you can collect and display other content that is relevant to your industry.
Your Business “Brand” is Your Lifeblood
In the marketing world, you know your brand is your lifeblood. It’s the one thing that sets you apart from the other countless sites out there. So why in the world would you want to affect this and start posting content that you or your business hasn’t written? How does other content from other websites really speak to your brand? Short answer, it doesn’t.
Unfortunately, content curation was a nice idea, but in hindsight, it really doesn’t work. In the business of SEO, it takes ‘unique’ content to get you ranked high. With content curation instead of unique content, you are just creating duplicates. This will end up giving you multiple duplicate content warnings that can affect your SEO rankings.
Google, who is one of the bigger players in the SEO game, doesn’t particularly like content curation either. Okay, that’s putting it lightly, they hate it. In fact, they require a high value for your content to ensure it’s unique, and something users really want to read. Reposting other people’s content does not add value to your website.
Is it really worth it?
If you are spending more time having to deal with duplicate content warnings, how is this beneficial to your business? Instead of saving you time, content curation has effectively wasted your time, and in turn money. The investment you put into this type of marketing tool is not worth it what so ever.
Conclusion
When you look at the big picture, content curation started as an okay idea, a way to add content to your website. Unfortunately, this okay idea didn’t take into account the possibility of duplicate content being a ‘bad’ thing in the world of SEO. It’s not brain surgery here folks, content curation will do nothing for your website except hurt your SEO rankings. Your brand that you worked so hard to establish and give a face to your company will be damaged in the process. Instead of using other content from other websites, spending some time and money and investing in quality, unique content will add that value to your website that Google is looking for. Your rankings and your wallet will thank you.