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One of the many pitfalls that webmasters can fall into is the lure of so-called “free content”. There are dozens of sites which list thousands of articles that can be cut and pasted freely onto your own website to ‘fill it up’. While this might sound like a good idea, it’s not.

First of all, the so-called “free content” is usually nothing more than someone else’s commercial marketing message that they’re hoping you’ll put in your site because it ultimately helps their brand, sells their products or drives traffic to their sites. But that’s a small problem, compared to the really serious problem with free content…

Free Content: Do the search engines see it that way?

What you call “free content”, Google, Yahoo! and the other major search engines call, “duplicate content“. There are dozens of sophisticated filters that spot duplicated content and penalize the rankings of sites that contain such content. The role of the search engine is to return unique results, and if they find 50 sites bearing the same content those sites are demoted in terms of Pagerank in order to prevent searchers from being inundated by cloned pages.

The result of attempting “beef up” your site with “free content” may ultimately be to drive your pagerank into the netherworld of sites that don’t get any visitors at all. Not only that, but once a site is suspected of being composed of copied pages, the URL can be permanently relegated to some lonely place deep in the listings.

Also keep in mind that while Google and Yahoo are excellent sources of new traffic, an essential part of any site’s traffic is repeat visitors. Remember that “new” traffic is usually a small trickle — but that trickle gets added to your repeat traffic in an endless process that ultimately results in loads of traffic. If you use “free content” (which is almost always terrible) it’s almost a sure-thing that you won’t have any repeat visitors to speak of.

All of this basically means, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want content: write it, pay someone to write it, get someone to write it in exchange for technical work, graphic work, etc. But using copied content is an almost certain way to guarantee yourself no traffic from search engines and no loyal visitors.

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