You may be the font of knowledge on a specialist subject the manufacturer of a wonder product that you supply to a myriad of vendors who, in turn, sell to the end user (for example). Perhaps you are an expert in your field and you churn out pages upon webpages of thoroughly useful articles relating to your area of expertise. Do you provide an XML feed for these vendors and other dispensers of knowledge, to help them spread the word?
If you do then you may well be benefiting the population at large but, if you want to rank highly for your products and services, you should also be mindful of preserving some unique content for your own site. If you’re not, you may well find that the vendors start to appear above you in Google’s rankings.
The best way to ensure that Google recognizes you for the expert you really are is to create some completely unique content that exists alongside the syndicated information and is for your website alone. In a thread that appeared on Google Webmaster Help, a member of the team outlined the least you can get away with by saying that you don’t really need to create a whole new article for the sake of the Googlebot, you could just insert a couple of sentences that don’t appear in the syndicated feed and that is enough to flag the content as unique. However, he went on to remind about the importance of unique content for, you know, the humans who view your site.
If people can read your information in 50 different places, why would they visit your site specifically? You need to give them a reason – stand out from the crowd by using your superior knowledge to give them something extra. Algorithms might play a big part in generating traffic to your site but you need to give the visitors a reason to come back.
Fancy a quick recap?
- Make sure there is content on your site that doesn’t appear on anyone else’s
- Just adding in a sentence or two is enough for Google to recognize it as unique
- Creating entirely new unique content will be preferable with the visitor