Original Content Matters

You often hear the term ‘you need to have original content’ if you want good rankings in Google, but what does original content mean, and why is it so important?

What’s considered original content?
In the exact sense of the term, original content is something that was never said before, i.e., content that was never published online. In reality, though finding content that is considered authentic is very rare (at least for the average person), what happens in most cases is publishing a different view or opinion for something that is already published.

What is essential if you are republishing content is to make sure that your content is unique. By unique, I mean that it does not exist in precisely the same form anywhere on the web. 

Why does original content matter?
Many people that are new to blogging or SEO need help to understand the importance of content uniqueness so what I will do below is summarize what the fuss is all about.

#1 – You need high-quality content to rank in Google: High-quality content has many characteristics, and one of them is original content. When Google crawls a page and detects its content is already available in its index, it will probably ignore it. If this happens for many pages on the same website, it will gradually harm the performance of that website in Google Search.

Does this mean that you cannot publish content on your website that was posted on other sites? If you need to do that, then you can set the page to ‘no-index’ so Google will not take it into account at all.

#2 – You need good content to do well in social media marketing: Besides Google, if you want to succeed in social media marketing and encourage users to engage with your content, then you need something which is at least unique (original, of course, is always better).

#3 – It’s the basis of any successful content marketing campaign: Content marketing is, of course, about content, and if you don’t provide content that is of high quality, then most likely, your content marketing campaign will fail creating a negative impact on your SEO and social media marketing.

How do you create original content?
The critical question now is how you create original content, especially when, as mentioned above, the opportunities of publishing something completely new are minimized. Here are some tips to help you start thinking in the right direction.

Say the story from a different point of view – Whether you are writing a news article or a technical review, try to approach it from a different perspective, as this will give you new ideas and enough room to create at least unique content.

Add your own opinion: Let’s say you are writing a review for a phone or laptop; one of the ways to differentiate your review from the rest of the online reviews is to state your own opinion and experience about the particular product. Of course, to be able to do that, you need to use the product first, another factor that will make your review better and more ‘original’ than the rest.

Don’t just re-write content but make it better – I know that there are cases where you end up re-writing content because you cannot easily add a different perspective or your own opinion. The problem with re-writing is that Google has become better at recognizing original content. Even if you don’t intend it, you may get a penalty because of poor-quality content.

You can avoid this by adding something new to the rewrite (maybe adding more details for one of the points made in the article) to add more value to the content overall.

Is text the only form of content?
It should be noted that while content has many forms: text, images, video, audio, or a combination of these, only text can be checked for uniqueness and originality. Google does not check for the originality of images (although they can do so).