Move Over Content! Value Is The New King.
Here is an interesting piece of advice from Matt Cutts himself:
The advice I’d give site owners is to take a step back and take a fresh look at your site. In many cases, you want to make sure that you’re adding lots of value for users.
Emphasis mine.
Matt gives this same advice time and time again on his blog. Unfortunately, many webmasters don’t realize that adding value doesn’t necessarily mean adding content.
In fact, when was the last time Google made a dime off of content it produced?
Their bread and butter search engine is just a glamorized scraper site. It adds value by organizing the scraped information based on the user’s search phrase better than anything else on the market right now.
Unlike Yahoo Finance, which actually hires experts to write financial commentary and has a set of how-to guides, Google Finance is just a news scraper.
Their popular ad system comprised of Adwords and Adsense is a service along with Gmail.
If Google penalized webmasters for not having unique content, it would be hypocritical, which would almost be evil, which is something Google wants nothing to do with.
The lesson to take away from all this is to think of other ways you can add value other than writing content.
For instance, is there a news feed that you can scrape that your users would be interested in? A blog feed? Is there other information (prices, reviews, detailed pictures, etc.) that would make your site more useful than the competition? Are there tools or services you can develop or link to that your users would enjoy using?
If you get the right mix of these value-adding services together, you’ll never have to write another piece of content again.
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