Things You Didn’t Know About Content Curation

Digital marketing activities have become more pervasive, the importance of search engine optimization continues to increase and companies invest in their online marketing campaigns in order to increase sales and ROI. The implementation of search engine optimization and search marketing within your online business will increase traffic. There are many ways of increasing your inbound links and content curation or buzz word was one of them. Information is shared and gathered in one portal for example. “Delicious”, “Digg” are some to mention.

Lately I stumbled upon some websites and read some articles about the effectiveness of content curation. They talked about content curation as a source of creating inbound links to websites and creating value.

Although it is true that content creation provides back links to a person’s website, but to what degree can one trust such back links? Many website owners use social media to get back links and some others use social channels for their online promotion. It is significant to understand that sending individual messages on social media sites is not only ineffective but also will definitely hurt a brand.

Take twitter as an example. Some guys in Philippine or other Asian countries create between 20 to 45 profiles, follow marketers and SEO companies, and then pitch them with irrelevant promotional messages which are considered spamming. This is a wrong way to do it. Pitching unwanted messages to people is unethical.

Internet is not the only tool in an online marketing. Many businesses do not rely on only Internet. I know someone who uses different offline marketing channels and make $300.000 a year. If you want to market ,you have to ask yourself why the prospect whom you’re sending unsolicited promotional messages  should buy from you. You have to understand your prospect and gain trust. Without understanding your prospects you can never turn them to clients. Sending spam is not the way to make money. Think about it, how many of those messages which you have sent and sending online and via email, turn to buyers?  You must measure your efforts and then choose the right way to do it . Some successful marketers test their campaigns in one city before launching their product or services nationwide or worldwide.Back to content curation.

There are some debates in regards to curated contents. If you add your content on their websites, your site may get hurt with a new unexpected Google algorithm update. So if you want to host other people’s content on your website or add yours on their website, think twice, because it may not be good for your web promotion. Besides what is your strategy of applying second hand news? It will be the same old directory and article submission process which was a trend a few years ago and put many websites in trouble a few years later.

Remember! Every strategy is fine unless you overuse it. Some SEO processes were trendy and worked a few years ago, they generated sales for websites as well. My customers sent me gifts and bonuses as a sign of their appreciation for helping them to land sales through content curation strategy. So it worked before, when Google changed their algorithm completely back in 2012. I and many SEO companies around the world stopped using certain curation strategies.

Why curated content is harmful in a long run?

A) Creates duplicated content
B) Authenticity issues
C) Integrity issues
D) It may hurt your website’s SEO
E) You have no control over your aggregated content on these sites
F) Poor quality if the source of link is not added

Most of the content curator tools are spam. They do not add any value. Some of them even fetch the whole article from the main source and add them on their sites. This will create duplicate content. For a few years I have been battling with some of content curators around the world for fetching my entire articles in various languages and adding them on their content curator websites. I had to create an in-house alert tool in order to detect such curators and disavow them immediately along with sending reports to search engines in order to devalue them.

Most aggregrators and auto-curators produce no value. However they are important for search engines. A part of any search engine algorithm is curated content and feeds. This is why it partially works if it is done right.

Imagine! If pattern recognition technology matches human eyesight, it will be a chaos. Today search engines are in their infant technology of artificial intelligence. Therefore some processes such as negative SEO is still a problem in search engines and Googlers such as John Muler’s rumors about ineffectiveness of back links will not solve this big issue.
Link building is a necessary component of marketing! The existence of any search engine algorithm is link building SEO.

Back to our discussion. Where do these authority content curators acquire their back links?

They get their back links from many sources such as: adding their links on certain browsers, seo tools, wordpress plugins, social media, aggregators, and buying a quantity of high PR links from authority websites. This is why they can afford to have your links on their websites without losing their websites’ authority.

In conclusion, using content curation is fine if it is not automated otherwise it will be nothing but another tool for spamming people. It is significant for website owners to think what they wish to accomplish when they use this content curation strategy. If they want to create back links for their websites, they should make sure to have control over them otherwise they will jeopardize their online marketing mainly SEO campaigns.

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