How Important is Unique Content for SEO? Matt Cutts Explains

Google has released a new Webmaster Help video based around creating unique content and it’s effects on SEO. In this case Matt Cutts answers a question about an ecommerce site that has around 1,000 product pages. The question essentially comes down to: How can I make the pages on my site unique?

So food for thought here… Google is looking for unique, quality content that is going to be of some value to it’s website’s users. If the content exists elsewhere on the web then that really determines and tells Google that it can’t be that higher quality.

We have recently had a similar situation, whereby we had to create an e-commerce site for a client which has over 50,000 product pages. Our mission was to of course, generate traffic to these product pages, but we also wanted to create high quality landing pages that were segmented by the product manufacturer that would really hit the rankings in the search engines. This was successful and proves what Matt is saying in the video, Google wants high quality pages and not regurgitated rubbish that can be found on many other websites… hence their reasons for the Google Panda Updates.

It just goes to show you that it’s not all about quantity, Google really want to focus on quality… and that is best for our users!