The Importance of Original Content

We've been developing our wiki now for nearly a year, and we've learned a good bit about Internet visibility and marketing from the experience. Aside from the wiki being an excellent tool for prospecting and lead generation (which we talked about in a previous blog post) the wiki has also reinforced one of the all-important SEO maxims: Content Is King.

Original content is a MUST if your webpages are going to stand a chance achieving decent rankings and search engine visibility. In studying our analytics over the past three months, we've noticed the two pages in particular seem to receive the bulk of the traffic to our wiki - and neither one of them is the homepage.

One page is an entry we wrote on the Matrix News Network:
http://morpheme.wikidot.com/matrix-news-network

And the other is an article about Chlamydia:
http://morpheme.wikidot.com/chlamydia

The other wiki pages only receive a trickle of traffic, when compared to these two. So, the natural question is why? What characteristics of these two pages differentiate them from the mass of other wiki pages?

Well, the first thing we noticed right off is that these two pages have citations and/or references, whereas most of the others do not. The citations aren't always original; many were borrowed from other articles.

The second difference is that there is at least some original content in these two articles. As our wiki is basically a mashup, most of the articles are merely scraped content, rearranged in an entertaining format. These two articles, on the other hand, consist of a bit of original material.

The third difference is that, though most of the content in these two articles isn't original, the content was taken from many different Web sources, via the GistWeb API. By contrast, the text content in the majority of the other wiki entries were, for the most part, taken from only one source: Wikipedia.

The SEO moral: If you have to scrape content, at least scrape the textual portion from a variety of Web sources, not just one. Also, try to include at least some original content, with authoritative citations, if you plan to achieve decent rankings.