How does curation effect your search rankings? This is one of the biggest questions we get from new users. It’s also a major concern to anybody looking to employ content curation in their own marketing.
Most people are worried about duplicate content. They are concerned that if they are curating or citing content they will somehow be penalized by having this content on their cite.
Is this something you should be concerned about?
Who better to explain these issues that Matt Cutts (of Google). In the video below he answers a question about re-posting (really curating) content and gets deep into curation.
Many sites have a press release section, or a news section that re-posts relevant articles. Since it’s all duplicate content, they be better off removing these sections (even with plenty of other unique content)?
So what are the key takeaways here?
Quality of Content
The first thing he covers is the difference between high quality and low quality. High quality is a trusted source that has a strong editorial in place. Low quality is a source that isn’t highly trusted and is obvious let’s just about any type of content to be released.
The high quality site is exercising discretion (curation) in what they select to release or highlight. The low quality site is not and in many ways not adding any measurable value.
He mentions a spectrum of quality or something along those lines. I’d change it a bit to say where do you fit within the spectrum of curation?
Matt goes on to talk about something we cover a ton here. He says…
It’s probably important to focus on what is competitive or what is compelling about your site.
Instead of having some automated curation system that just fills in items based on your keywords you want to focus on what is going to keep people coming back. What is going inline with the overall value you provide on your site or your brand.
The video ends with one of the most important points about curation- editorial philosophy. If you have a philosophy on what your about, your key value this ensures your going to link to trusted sources. With editorial philosophy comes usefulness and ultimately as a curator that’s what you want to accomplish.
In the end curation is effective when people find it compelling and can’t resist coming back to your site.
