Most site owners are now becoming aware that to rank highly on Search Engines like Google and Bing that their sites needs lots of good quality content. Most site owners are also aware that producing good quality content on a regular basis can prove difficult. Some look for ways that they can post good quality content with the minimum of effort on their part.
Directly copying articles has been known to be a fruitless technique for a number of years now. Search engines are very good at identifying when text has been copied from another source and penalising websites that use it. In a recent video Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam busting team has answered the question “What if I just take two or three lines of text from a number of articles and use them to create a new article?”
The short answer from Matt is “Don’t do this”. In his answer he mentions the words “added value” and this is the key to answering the question and could even be said to be the key to search engine optimisation at the current time. You are unlikely to be penalised if you quote a couple of lines of text from another source, attributing it to the original author, as part of a larger article in which you are making your own points.
For example, if you were writing a post about search engine optimisation and you quoted a point made by a leading industry expert on their own website and then discussed the point in greater detail then that would still be counted as a quality article as you are adding value to your reader’s experience of your website.
On the other hand if you think that you can take two or three lines from, say, 20 websites and then just post that content then, even if you have attributed the original source, the article will be seen as low quality and is unlikely to help you achieve higher search engine rankings.
There are still companies who try to sell “article spinning” as a technique to improve your rankings. The theory behind article spinning involves taking an original seed article and then changing certain words so that the text still has the same meaning but the wording is different. The aim is to produce dozens of articles all from one original document. Often the spinning is performed automatically by software and this will lead to a document that to paraphrase Eric Morecambe has “all the right phrases but not necessarily in the right order”. The resulting articles can be unreadable.
If you are providing your website users with a poor experience then why should they buy from you? In the digital age your website is very often the first experience that a user has of your brand and you need to try to make your site as compelling as possible.
If you are serious about ranking well on search engines then you need to realise that there are no short cuts to success. You need to prove to Google and other search engines that your site provides high quality content in relation to your chosen field. If you do not feel that you are capable of creating this type of content yourself then consider employing a copywriter to help you to produce quality content. Most of all remember not to write content for search engines but to write for your users. By doing so you are likely to gain more sharing of your content on social media and this is likely to also lead to you gaining better rankings on search engines.