HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday topic today was "How Unique Does Content Need to Be to Perform Well in Search Engines?"

We constantly underscore the importance of providing quality, useful content to your audience. And making sure that both the intended audience and the search engines can find it. Rand tackles the question many people have when trying to provide new unique content -- What is duplicate content? Of course, we know just because it's interesting to search engines doesn't mean it's interesting to people (and vice-versa).

How Unique Does Content Need to Be to Perform Well in Search Engines

Very timely. Chad and I were just discussing how some competitors (to rename nameless) still use duplicate content heavily. It's frustrating because we know (as Rand points out) that these duplicate articles carry no weight, but it seems the consumers are not really understanding this.

Agreed. That is very frustrating. Some folks still sell SEO as if it were a nuclear arms race where more is better. 300 duplicate submissions must surely be better than a single (UNIQUE!) piece of content...right? ;-)

Educating is half the battle.

I think content is going to have to be more and more unique as search engine tactics become more advanced

Illustrates the importance of having to use all possible keyword combinations, key combinations of words, different orders of keywords, varied search term order, combinations of keywords, etc in the content.