WOW. This is probably – no – definitely my favorite Whiteboard Friday video in almost a year. Last Friday Rand chose the topic on “Unique Content” and what about content makes it unique to Google. He goes in-depth describing specifically what parts of a page are considered content and what exactly makes that unique content.
For my team and I, our SEO copywriter is like a hand is to an arm – an extension of the body, a part of every day life. If you cannot budget in a copywriter, you need to find someone on your team – or yourself – to consistently create new content where possible and uniquely share other’s content, adding your own unique value to each post. Whatever that may be – from opinions to images or video commentary, there needs to be identifiably unique value in the content you publish online.
Important Quotes About Content Uniqueness from this WBF
For SEO purposes, search engines like to filter out what they view as duplicative content, things that are exactly the same. They never want to show you a set of results where result two, three, four, and five are all exactly the same article or are essentially the same three paragraphs repeated with the same photos embedded in them.
The first thing that I always like to talk about when we get into a discussion of content uniqueness is that content, when we talk about the content that the engines are considering for this, we’re referring only to the unique material on a page. That excludes navigation, ads, footers, sidebars, etc.
Uniqueness applies to both internal and external sources. Copying either one can be trouble. It could be that these are other pages on your site and these are other pages somewhere else on the web where this content exists, and you’re taking from those and putting those pieces on your site. That can be a problem in either of those cases.
However, when I say that, what I don’t mean to say and what I know a lot of people get confused about in the SEO world is this doesn’t mean that you can’t take a paragraph from Wikipedia and put it in a bigger article that you’re writing, or cite a blogger and include a couple of phrases that they say, or take a piece from New York Magazine or from the Wall Street Journal, from Wired, or wherever you want and take, “Oh hey, I’m going to caption this, and I’m going to have a little clip of it. I’m going to put a video that exists on YouTube already.” That’s not duplicative so long as you are adding unique value.
There’s this imagination that exists in the minds of folks in the SEO field, and has for a long time, that there must be some mythical percentage. If over here, “Oh, this is 100% duplicate and this is 0% duplicate, 100% unique and this is the 50/50 mark, there must be some imaginary, magical, if I just get to like right here at 41%, that’s the number. Therefore I’m going to create a huge website and all my pages just have to hit that 47% mark.” That is dead wrong. Just totally wrong. There’s nothing like this.
Bloomberg and Business Week are constantly producing the same articles. Business Insider will produce articles from all over the place. Huffington Post will take articles from places that writers submit, and it’ll be published in different places. People will publish on one site, and then they’ll publish privately on their own blog. Sometimes Google will list both, sometimes they won’t. It’s not about a percentage. It’s about the unique value that’s provided, and it’s about a very sophisticated algorithm that considers lots of other features.
Duplicate and low value content, because of Google’s Panda update from 2011, Panda means that low quality content, duplicative content that exists on one part of your site can actually harm your overall site.
