Thinking about Unique Content

One of the thing that constant-content.com offers publishers who are looking for freelance writing is unique content. There is a great post about unique text versus unique content that I think is really worth discussing.

The basic idea is that unique text is what you get when you visit a few internet resources on a topic and rewrite the content that is found there. While the text is unique, its not really what we (or search engines) would call unique content. For unique content there needs to be some great thinking, synthesis and understandability in the content. Hopefully, there will be a few "A ha" moments and after a real live person has read the article they'll feel smarter, entertained, perhaps even enlightened.

In some cases, unique text is produced by just taking an existing article and applying a thesaurus to the words and doing some minor sentence structure reorganization. While this is unique text, it is tantamount to plagiarism. The article may not be identified as duplicate content by search engines, but from a readers perspective there is no value that has been added to the article. In cases where we get submissions that are just rewrites of previously published articles we consider this a form of plagiarism, with all the associated consequences (see Professionalism and Plagiarism in the Writer Guidelines).

The internet is really great when it provides you with just the answer you were looking for. When you want to to convert your old your 1985 mix tapes to digital you want to find out How to convert tapes to MP3's and you want that article to be spot on, so you don't have to search again or go anywhere else. And from a search engines point of view, that's what they want to give you. It's unlikely that an article is a rehash of some one else's work will ever be as popular as the original. But an article that draws together a number of scattered sources and adds great style and some original thinking to the mix is going to be a great article. And as previously mentioned, quality sells.

This metaphor from SugarRae.com really hits the idea of unique content on the head

"Think of content like movie plots. When a movie is predictable or the basic plot has been done ten times before, you want to see something new – a new spin from the director, a better level of special effects or an unexpected twist to the plotline to name a few. If a movie is a repeat of five others you’ve seen before – and it doesn’t give you anything new aside from different actors, how likely are you to see it again or recommend it to others?"

And in the end, having unique content, is not just so that a search engine can spider it and pick up a few keywords, it's about providing something that is interesting for people to read. Something that will help them on their way. Linkable Content.

Interestingly, unique content is also really linkable. For people running their own websites, having text that people link to is like having someone on the internet vote for your site. For people building up a website, links are an important aspect of building their reputation and rank. Good links to your site aren't easy to find. However, links to interesting content are easy to share.

[Edit: to add a little more detail on the line between plagiarism and summarizing, Thanks Ed.]

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