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What of Content Aggregation?
Content farms don’t just use black-hat linking practices. They also use ever-more sophisticated analytics to learn how to game the system. The basic formula is to aggregate content from other sites so that they appear to Google to be the most relevant to search queries. This is done by using search to find the most relevant sites to some keywords, and working out a relationship to aggregate their content on your page, using RSS. It tends to work better for longer tail search queries because the competition for those words is lower. But the result is the same: A lot of irrelevant junk.
Those familiar with my podcast series with Kristina Halvorson and Mike Moran on the limits of content curation will know that I take a dim view of set-it-and-forget-it content aggregation. One of the main reasons I dislike these kinds of content strategies is the appearance of running a content farm on your site. Even if you have the best intentions in setting up an aggregator, if it is not done well, it can become a bunch of junk thrown together with no apparent audience or user intent in mind.
Well, Google just gave us another reason to dislike the practice: If your pages don’t contain a minimum level of original content, they will not likely ever rank well in Google. Content aggregation has its place, but only as a supplementary stream on a page. For example, on ibm.com, we aggregate Twitter feeds related to hash tags relevant to the page in question. But these feeds are typically outside the white space on the page as complementary elements to the original content in the white space.
The Semantic Web might enable more intelligent mixes of original and aggregated content. But for the time being, aggregation is typically not sophisticated enough to worth doing in anything but a complementary stream. Given Google’s recent announcement, content strategists should focus ever more intently on how to create search-optimized original content. This will garner the largest, most targeted audience for your content.
James Mathewson is the Globle Search and Content Strategy Lead for IBM, and co-author of Audience, Relevance and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content. The opinions expressed above are his own and not IBM’s.