Be a Content Creator Not a Content Scraper

We all have heard that phrase that content is king.  And for the most part, it still is.  It’s definitely still king if you are creating good content.  Notice how I said creating, not scraping.  You may be asking, what is a content scraper?  It is a person, or machine, that scans through the internet and find content that is relative to what they are looking to rank higher for in search engines or relevant to the products that they are trying to sell.  For example, if I wrote a diabetic blog (which I do), and there was a company that sold diabetes related supplies, they would take the content from my site and re-purpose it on their site.  This is different than syndication because the original writer is not giving permission to use the content and most of the time, not receiving full credit for the content.

Maybe you have read a lot of blogs about the better your content the more traffic you will get because your SEO is going to be great.  Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there is no SEO value in this content scraping.  Google will know who the original post was by and give credit to that site and index that page.  The page that your content is on, is not going to get indexed.  If you are working with an SEO consultant or an SEO agency and they recommend that you do this, I think it is time to reach out to a new one.

If you want to rank better and have good content on your site, than create it.  If you are not a writer of any sort, than outsource the writing to a copywriter.  You can get great content for reasonable prices.  If you really can’t afford anything at all, than reach out to bloggers in your industry and niche and ask them to write guest posts.  But you better be prepared to give them full credit for the post and several links back to their site or else the relationship is not going to work.

Remember, content is only king when it is unique and fresh and is worth linking back to.