SEO and Content Curation
Winning the favor of search engines is always a good thing. When people search for content in your niche, being found high in the results is always a benefit for your site. As much as you like return traffic from people who already know and love your site, attracting new visitors is necessary to replace those who inevitably lose interest.
The other factor, of course, is creating content on your site that people find helpful and that search engines find to be worth sharing with their users. Such content goes a long way in winning those coveted high rankings in search engine results.
So far, so good. The rub comes in creating an ongoing stream of quality information to meet the needs of visitors and search engines. There can be a lot of work in creating this content. Small businesses and individual marketers are hard-pressed to create a steady flow of quality content. That’s why they often turn to content curation.
They seek helpful content created by other sites, they write content of their own to place that found content in a suitable context for their readers and include an representative selection from the content they found.
IM NewsWatch, for example writes some fresh, new content (primarily in our marketing commentary blogs), but most of our content is curated from other experts in fields related to Internet marketing. This takes our editor and our publisher many hours each day to find and contextualize good content, but it would take far more time to create an equal amount of helpful content ourselves. For 15 years, we have published curated content about online marketing, and it has earned us a faithful following.
Indeed, this very post is an example of our curation process.
The question arises, “What impact does curated content have on the success of the site’s SEO efforts?” If curation reduces your priority in search engine results, then you need to weigh that reduction against the improvement the curated content provides in the quality of your site.
There is an interesting analysis of this question on the WP Mayor site. The author is optimistic about the net effect of curated content, saying “While content curation requires some skill to be successful, when it’s implemented correctly, it can give your site’s SEO a significant boost.”
In explaining this conclusion, it investigates three ways curated content affects the search engine algorithms and show the impact each of these has.
In summary, they note, “Successful curation requires a careful balance between sourcing content and adding your own take on it. However, when done well, content curation can take your site to new heights.”
Read their whole analysis here:
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