The Importance of Unique Content for Your Website

Matt Cutts was recently on a panel with other high profile SEO’s that critiqued some websites and gave some insight into how Google feel’s about the importance of unique content. On his blog, he said:

“Once again, I sat on the end and had my wireless and VPN working so that I could use all of my Google tools. The promotional gifts company had a couple issues. For one thing, I was immediately able to find 20+ other sites also belonged to the promotional gifts person. The other sites offered overlapping content and overlapping pages on different urls. The larger issue was searching for a few words from a description quickly found dozens of other sites with the exact same descriptions. We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when you’re running lots of sites. One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback (forums, reviews, etc.). The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection. If I can spot duplicate content in a minute with a search, Google has time to do more in-depth duplicate detection in its index.”

It’s clear that Google frowns upon content that is essentially recyled by webmasters and used on other similar sites. For one, it’s obvious from Matt’s comments that is very easy for Google to detect networks of sites owned by one owner. Most SEO’s know this but if you didn’t know that, be warned. As the algorithms evolve and are better able to detect what they consider spam, what may work today may be considered spam tomorrow. It’s also obvious that Google also does not want people changing a few words, changing “happy” to “glad” and think that it’s perfectly fine with Google to add all that recyled content too all the different sites you have. Unique content is one of the problems anyone who has a bunch of sites has to consider if you have sites that are topically similar.  Essentially, what Google wants is for you to actually contribute to the web by adding original content. Can you believe they have the gall to want that? What a pain! Actual fresh content? Golly jeez…that’s asking a lot. Why write original content when you can steal it from someone else right? That’s just a crazy idea. Original content. Yes, you can get more traffic by adding fresh content to your site. But it’s sooo much work. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to work for it isn’t it?

Seriously though, find ways to create unique content. Expand your mind, think outside of the box. I can assure you that you will see the rewards of your work, but it doesn’t happen by luck. I’ve had good success hiring writers for fairly cheap but make sure the content that they’re writing is actually unique. Let them know before they start that you check for originality of work by using tools that check for duplicate content and you will have a much better chance of having original content written for you.