Search Engine Marketing – Little or No Original Content

Search Engine Marketing – Little or No Original Content

• April 18, 2019
• Lyle Harnett
• SEO Marketing
• No Comments

If you want to improve the ranking of your site in the search results of Google you have to make sure that your site has plenty of rich content.

Like it or not, Google is the world’s largest search engine. As such, anyone looking to achieve any level of good Google search engine optimization must strive to meet their quality guidelines.

These guidelines are designed to help improve the natural search engine optimization of websites and web pages with quality content. Of all the stated guidelines that Google publishes, there is probably no greater search engine marketing pitfall than publishing pages with not so much original content.

What is Little or No Original Content?

This may at first seem like a redundant question given that the answer is seemingly so simple. Unfortunately, things are rarely as they seem; in this instance, it’s because little or no original content actually refers to a wide range of possible conditions. It’s important to understand what this entails because many false search engine marketing professionals continue to sell these search engine marketing quality pitfalls to unsuspecting victims.

• Scraped Content – this refers specifically to content written or designed by someone not associated with the site and who have not given their permission to reproduce it. Scraped content is quite literally stolen from someone else then used to make money for the person (or site) that stole it by diluting search engine results.

• Doorway Pages or Bridge Pages – these are pages which are intentionally designed to contain no readable content for the visitor, but rather to give false authority to actual content pages. Some may have noticed that when they follow a specific link, they end up on a page with only an advertisement and are required to “skip this ad” or “click here to continue” before they can reach the page they were expecting to see; that’s a doorway page.

Search Engine Marketing: Why is Little or No Original Content An Issue?

There are two sides to this coin; imagine for a moment, someone is looking for information on say “search engine optimization”. They open a browser, enter their search words and a list of results is displayed. Now imagine the level of frustration experienced as that person has to navigate through 4, 5, 6 or more sites to find actual informative material because they keep running into useless web pages.

On the flip side, imagine the level of frustration the owner of legitimate website experiences when they find out someone else has made several carbon copies of their site and is stealing their customers. All the time, effort and money put into developing a solid website only to have someone else steal it.

Search Engine Marketing: Little or No Original Content is Spamdexing

Spamdexing refers to just about any web search engine optimization tactic that attempts to artificially boost the ranking of a web page; using little or no original content falls into this category and is contradictory to what search engine is attempting to achieve. Google’s goal is “to provide users with the most relevant results and great user experience.” Websites that conduct their search engine marketing with methods against the guidelines could quickly find their sites removed entirely from the indexes.

In the race to achieve top search engine results, it’s tempting to look for shortcuts and so-called ‘quick wins’. Is top ranking today worth having one’s site removed from search engines tomorrow? Always keep in mind, if a search engine marketing tactic does not add value to a site and does not improve the visitor’s experience, then chances are, it’s a quality pitfall.