Summary: When you’re just starting out with your website, it might be tempting to cheat and employ underhand techniques to get a lot of content on your site quickly. However, this could result in poor rankings, penalties or complete removal from Google and the other search engines.
You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘content is king’ if you’ve been doing your research on SEO. Next to link building, having great quality content is one of the top factors for achieving a good ranking on Google. Good quality content is unique, interesting content that includes relevant key words and phrases, and that visitors will want to read and want to link to. Of course, it takes time to build up a bank of good content so what you can do to speed up this process?
Some website owners try and create pages using a lot of text but no real authentic content. Google’s business is to create an accurate index that delivers quality content to its users so naturally, Google has invested a lot of resources in detecting tricks like this, and Google has gotten very good at it. Where Google detects that your site contains very low value content, you’ll find that your rankings suffer and sometimes you’ll be removed from the Google index. So what kind of practices should you avoid?
Auto generated content - you’ll find from time to time websites that contain random paragraphs of text that sort of look like English but don’t make any sense or contain any value. They will however contain keywords. Website owners create these to boost their traffic – they’ll often contain a lot of ads too as that’s how they make their revenue.
Thin affilate sites – these sites have little or no content at all but just contain lists of pay per click adverts. They are often low quality template sites.
Doorway pages - these are pages on websites created specifically for search engines. They are often loaded with links and keywords, sometimes hidden, to try and get a better ranking.
Scraped content – this is content taken from other sites. Sometimes it’s stolen (i.e. without permission). Other times, it’s taken with permission, i.e. from article sites where copying is allowed if the author’s link is included. Sites purely from scraped content don’t add value to the web and Google will find and penalise them in time.
The above doesn’t mean you should never reproduce articles from the web (where you have permission). You could put together a helpful collection of resources this way. The key is having additional value – unique content, reviews, ratings, guides – that makes your site not just a copy of other web pages.
It’s also fine being an affiliate – again the key is having valuable content as well as the affiliate links.
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1 Response to “I need lots of content for SEO – should I cheat?”
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said at 3:42 pm on July 21st, 2010
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