Getting content on your site

Content is king, they say. I'd pretty much have to agree - for several reasons. Search engines make content a valuable commodity. Textual content in particular is what I'm talking about. I don't think that search engines have figured out a good way to index the content in a video or picture very well yet.

If you're relying on natural rankings in the search engines to get your traffic, the more content you have on your web site, the more money you'll make. It's really that easy. There are plenty of other factors to worry about, the most important of which is linking, but content comes first in importance on any SEO's list.

This is great, but I'm busy putting up 50 other sites, and programming some cool technology and conducting A/B tests on PPC marketing, and attempting to get at least 5 hours of sleep per night. So when am I going to have time to write content? There are plenty of places to get content for your site, with a little bit of ingenuity.

Here are a few of the places I've gotten content from in the past. I can't offer guarantees about the quality of the content, or if the search engines like this content, but it's not breaking any copyright laws, and not pissing anybody off too much. I do not reccommend using this content on a valuable domain - you're risking dup content penalties.

My favorite place to get content is from the Newsgroups. You need to program an NNTP interface to pull data down from a news server, but search engines seem to love the real conversations taking place on the newsgroups. Several of my sites have over 250,000+ pages of content from the newsgroups. Google isn't liking it too much these days, but Yahoo is flooding me!

I've scraped data from firstgov.gov for content filler on many a page with too few quality words for a search term. Load a database with keywords related to the theme of your site and do a search on firstgov.gov for the exact keyword phrase in parens.

I've used the google API to put the top search terms for a keyword as content filler. I definitely do not reccommend this path anymore...

I've used RSS feeds.

I've scraped articles from article directories like the ones I blogged about yesterday.

I've experimented with keyword replacement on copyrighted articles by writing a script to replace adjectives and verbs with their synonyms. This didn't produce very readable copy, so I've scrapped the project for now.

I've coded forums, review sites, and "wiki" type sites where people surfing the site product more content. This is good stuff, if you can get the people on the site in the first place to produce it.


Here's the catch with all this content though (aside from the forum/review/wiki model). It's not unique content. It's duplicate content. When I get fancy, I'll pull snippets out of large pieces of text to make it a little more unique, and keyword dense, but I'm basically putting duplicate content on my sites. This is NOT a reccommended path for long term site quality. Eventually all the search engines will catch onto dup content and quit sending you traffic. But, if you can automate the task in many many categories/urls, there is money to be made... ...for now...

I'm always on the lookout for good places to pull quality, non-copyrighted content from...