Google’s Matt Cutts: Stitching Content Makes For Bad Quality Content

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video today on the topic of “stitching content.” Stitching content is the practice of taking snippets of content from other websites and pasting them on your own site, with citations. Matt Cutts basically said it is not a good technique that will lead to rankings in […]

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matt cuttsGoogle’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video today on the topic of “stitching content.” Stitching content is the practice of taking snippets of content from other websites and pasting them on your own site, with citations.

Matt Cutts basically said it is not a good technique that will lead to rankings in Google. Matt actually said that Yahoo “hated this technique” and considered that “spam.”

Taking quotes from someone else is “not a lot of added value” and thus is not something Google will rank well.

This is in comparison to synthesizing content from other sources, like Wikipedia does. Wikipedia will summarize the content and source the sites they get their information from, but the content itself is often uniquely written and summarized with sources.

But just quoting a bunch of third party sites and not adding a lot of unique content to it, that will not lead to good rankings.

Here is the video:

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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