What brings visitors to your website?

Remark: This article has originally been posted under a different title with a different intention. It has been changed in major parts.

In theory people visit a website because of its unique content. They chose a website because it provides information no other site offers. In practice very few websites offer unique content and people prefer a site over another because of its page-rank. The relevance of google™ page-rank in the web world is mostly undisputed but here are some search results, sugessting that its relevance surpasses the relevance of unique content to an extend where the latter is only a device to get a high page rank:

The majority of the “about 309,000,000″ hits for the term “unique content” is about search engine optimisation or automated content generation. I took a rather subjective approach of filtering by adding the following terms: “-seo -service -adwords -marketing -traffic -affiliate -free -automated -adsense -database -engine” and concluded that about 90% hits included at least one of these probably seo related terms. I’m quoting one of the 300,000,000 hits here as a representative:

Search Engines and Duplicate Content

Plagiarism, which is nothing but copied content, produces duplicate content between two websites. It is well known that search engines are adverse to duplicate or identical content and that page rankings can suffer because of plagiarism. Google has guidelines against plagiarism and warns website owners against creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content, as stated in its Webmaster Guidelines. Having even a substantially duplicate content, much more a totally duplicate website, will penalize a websites’ page rank.

It is quite interesting that uniqueness is defined as not being a true-to-the-word plagiarism of something already in existance. Naturally this is the only condition for uniqueness, an automated search crawler can verify but it is against the intuition that unique content should transport some idea not yet stated on the web. But try to think of the last unique idea you saw on the web. There might be such thing, but it occurs vary rarely.

There always has been redundancy in human communication. In itself, there is nothing new or wrong with the observation that, when thinking of a common topic, people come to similar conclusions and questions and have an urge to make them public. But in the days before the web, “public” implied a far smaller audience for nearly all communicators.

Don’t let any artificial ranking decide what you publish and how.