Your Automated Content Strategy Might Be Hurting Your SEO

Your Automated Content Strategy Might Be Hurting Your SEO

 September 12, 2017

Does your website provider offer a feature to automate content creation on your blog and social media accounts? Frequent posting is generally a good practice, but what do you really get when you pay for automated content creation? The truth is, you may be getting something that does more harm than good.

At best, it’s duplicate content. At worst, it’s plagiarism.

Automated content does not appear out of thin air – it is typically taken from someone else’s blog via an RSS feed, without permission or attribution. This may be an easy way to get content on your blog, but without proper attribution, it’s plagiarism, and it’s a punishable offense that Google refers to as duplicate content:

In some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic.

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

Content that’s not relevant ruins your social visibility.

Social media platforms punish you for content that your viewers don’t engage with. Your social followers are likely to unfollow you when your content does not interest them, but even if they don’t, Facebook has ways of dealing with low quality posts. Facebook’s algorithms will quickly suppress frequent posters who get no likes, no shares, and no engagement. It can be incredibly difficult to overcome this suppression once you’ve been categorized as an “irrelevant poster”, so you should only post engaging high quality content to stay visible. After all, what good is automated posting if no one will see it?

When you’re auto-posting someone else’s RSS feed, you may be promoting lofts in Chicago when you sell country homes in Georgia. Clearly, this content is going to be irrelevant to your audience. Remember that the whole point of a content strategy for internet marketing is to provide value and show that you are the expert in your market.

There are no shortcuts

A successful strategy for internet marketing requires content that is fresh and unique, and you’re not going to get that with an automated content strategy. If writing isn’t your thing, there are plenty of legitimate bloggers that can write great content for your website, but they do not come cheap. If the price sounds too good to be true, it probably is, so don’t fall for a content strategy that could harm your business.

Questions about marketing and SEO for your real estate website? Call our web marketing consultants at 866-645-7702.


Kevin Ashley

By Kevin Ashley

Kevin is a Web Developer and Marketing Expert for iHOUSEweb. He has a degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he specializes in front end web development, web advertising, and web analytics. Kevin works closely with real estate agents all over the US, and he helps to communicate their needs to the team of Software Engineers at iHOUSEweb.