So what does Google think about Content Curation? The video below is by Matt Cutts, a leading technologist on Google’s search engine team. If you are doing any curation, you really should view it.
As with anything Google, nothing is black and white. Matt’s continuum of sites shows that Google’s expertise at evaluating web properties is startling. They are clearly trying to build a machine intelligence that can classify sites with ever tighter discrimination. I really think their goal is to read and evaluate a web site just as a human would.
This means that you are rarely, if ever, going to be able to just auto post content and build SEO value for your site. As I’ve said before, if you have a very small, well defined niche, becoming an aggregator of content, even auto posting, could be of value to your clients or subscribers. Just don’t expect an SEO boost.
The good news is that curation does have some SEO value, if you follow some key guidelines that Matt mentions. These are quotes from his video:
- “a lot of effort into curation”
- “editorial voice”
- “distinctive point of view”
It all comes down to writing for your client or subscriber base, not for SEO itself. If you focus on curating good content, building your voice and point of view, you will gain authority. Let Google catch up to you, they are working on it every day. As they do so, your site will gain in SEO value over time. Maybe not all at once, but in increments. And it will last and not fall off the search page as will other sites who try and cut corners with auto posted or minimal editorial content curation.