The value of unique content

Aha me hearties. Just found a pirate website scraping our content…

We all know that it is important to create unique content for blogs and websites in order to ensure that we pick up not just interested visitors, but also to rank for long tail terms, non duplicate content etc etc.

However, this blog is entirely unique content, and is written to be of interest on topics such as search engine marketing, Pay Per Click, Web PR and so on, based on news, views and opinions from in-house and around the Web.

So, it is with interest today, when clearing out the spam comments, and considering the value of unique content as a traffic driving technique, to view how some blogs are scraping content from other blogs eg ours, and then using a thesaurus and word replacement software to generate supposedly unique content, articles, blog posts etc.

The problem is, it makes no sense! Just replacing the word ‘try’ with ‘essay’ in itself is enough to generate confusion, let alone much of the other utter rubbish that such automated word replacement tools create!

Reminder to all: black hat techniques and attempting to con the search engines may seem like a great idea over a pint, ditto article autowriters, but if all it generates is a load of total bunkum, it is hardly a long term strategy worth pursuing if you want to establish a solid, viable business with a good reputation. However, looking at the Who Is records for this particular domain, it seems they are using domain privacy to protect their identity anyway – hardly a strategy which establishes trust in the first place!