MATT CUTTS: OK.
Today's question comes from Gus in Massachusetts.
And Gus asks, many sites have a press release section or a
news section that re-posts relevant articles.
Since it's all duplicate content, would they be better
off removing these sections even with plenty of other
unique content?
The answer is probably yes.
But let me give you a little bit of color about the
reasoning for that.
So a lot of the times at Google, we're thinking about a
continuum of content, and the quality of that content, and
what defines the value add for a user.
So let's draw a little bit of an axis here and think a
little bit about what's the difference between high
quality guys versus low quality guys?
Take somebody like The New York Times.
Right?
They write their own original content.
They think very hard about how to produce high quality stuff.
They don't just reprint press releases.
You can't just automatically get into The New York Times.
It's relatively hard.
Right?
At the other end of this spectrum is the sort of thing
that you're talking about, where you might have a regular
site, but then one part of that site, one entire section
of that site, is entirely defined by maybe just doing a
news search, maybe just searching for keywords in
press releases.
Whatever it is, it sounds like it's pretty auto-generated.
Maybe it's taking RSS feeds and just slapping
that up on the site.
So what's the difference between these?
Well, The New York Times is exercising discretion.
It's at exercising curation in terms of what it selects even
when it partners with other people, and whenever it puts
other content up on its site.
And most of its content tends to be original.
Most the time it's thinking about, OK, how do we have the
high quality stuff?
As opposed to this notion-- even if you've got high
quality stuff on the rest of your site, what is the value
add of having automatically generated, say, RSS feeds or
press releases, where all you do is you say, OK.
I'm going to do a keyword search for Red Widgets and see
everything that matches.
And I'm just going to put that up on the page.
So on one hand, you've got content that's
yours, original content--
there's a lot a curation.
On the other hand, you've got something that's automated,
something that's more towards the press release side of
things, and it's not even your content.
So if that's the case, if you're just looking for
content to be indexed, I wouldn't go about
doing it that way.
It's probably not worth just having automatically generated
stuff that could be duplicate content.
Because everybody else has access to the same article
bank directories, or the same press releases, or the same
scraping of search results, or scraping of news results, or
something like that.
It's probably better to focus on, what is the value add?
What is compelling about your site?
What are the reasons why people will really
return to your site?
Because just taking a single key word like red widgets and
saying, OK, the value add of my curation is that I have
selected the key word red widgets, and then everything
else just runs in a cron job, and it's a script, and it's
completely automated--
that's not going to add nearly as much value.
So that's the spectrum.
That's the continuum.
And then if you're doing things like, if the content is
content that nobody else has access to, or if you're
writing your own content, or if you're really putting a lot
of effort into curation--.
You can have like "Daring Fireball," which is John
Gruber's blog.
And he links to other sites.
But he decides what to link to.
And he has his own editorial philosophy where he wants to
highlight things that are of interest to him.
Whereas if you just have something that's completely
automated and everything that matches shows up, that's
really not nearly as useful.
There's no editorial voice there.
There's no distinctive point of view that users would find
compelling, and that would cause them to come back, and
would make them really interested in your site.
So if all you're doing is using that kind of a script, I
would probably say drop it.
It's not worth the effort.
And sometimes when users land on your site, they're like,
OK, this seems kind of junky.
Why not just concentrate on the good stuff?
But hopefully this spectrum of the kinds of criteria that we
would use in thinking about whether that's useful to
users, and thus whether we think it's useful to have show
up in the search results, gives you a little bit of an
idea about when you really want to have those kinds of
stuff and when you really probably would
rather avoid it.
Hope that helps.