What are your thoughts on Content Automation?
-
Hi,
I want to ask forum members’ opinion on content automation. And before I raise the eyebrows of many of you with this question, I’d like to state I am creating content and doing SEO for my own website so I’m not looking to cut corners with spammy tactics that could hurt my website from an organic search perspective.
The goal is to automate pages in the areas of
headings, Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and perhaps a paragraph of content. More importantly, I’d like these pages to add value to the users experience so the question is…. How do I go about automating the pages, and more specifically, how is meta title, meta descriptions etc. automated?
I’d also like to hear from people that recommend steering clear of any form of content automation.
I hope my question isn’t too bit vague and I look forward to hearing from other Mozzers.
Regards,
Russell in South Africa
-
We have a CMS that automatically generates the meta description and keywords for our pages and I hate it.
Not sure why we even have it and can't get around it.
We have to override it each time to get sensible tags, therefore it isn't worth having.
Avoid it and write your own tags manually.
-
I hope my question isn’t too bit vague...
I have no idea of what you are talking about. How about explaining it in some detail.
-
I am not aware of any tools that would be able to automatically create H1 or meta titles/descriptions. Why would you want to though? You spent the time to create good content (or paid someone to), why wouldn't you take the time to optimize your page? In the scheme of things, that is easy and shouldn't take you a fraction the time it took for you to create the content itself.
BTW, your consept of content automation and Google's idea of content automation is different. Google views content automation as the process of automatically populating pages with content from RSS feeds or scraping sites. If you want to know how the Google Spam team views this, check out Matt Cutt's video on the subject. Here is a hint. NO NO NO NO
-
You can't get there from here.
As far as I know, we don't yet have a high quality dynamic content creation tool that populate the content areas you speak of with good enough content to make it worth your while--not with today's Google.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Is writing good content the best SEO?
Hi, After reading Mr. Shepard's amazing article on the 7 concepts of advanced on-page SEO (https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts), I decided to share my own experience in hopes of helping others. I started doing legal SEO back in 2013. At the time I really didn't know much about SEO. My first client (my brother) had recently left the D.A.'s office to become a criminal defense attorney. I told him to write content for the following areas: domestic violence, sex crimes, and homicide. He finished his first content piece on domestic violence and I was not impressed. It seemed too unique, individualized, and lacked the "generic" feel that many of the currently ranking pages had. Please note that I don't mean "generic" in a negative way. I just mean that his content regarding domestic violence felt too personalized. Granted, his "personalized" approach came from a Deputy D.A. with over 13 years handling domestic violence, sex crimes, and murder cases. I was inclined to re-write his content, but lacking any experience in criminal law I really had no choice but to use it. IMPORTANT: Please note that I barely knew any SEO at the time (I hadn't even yet discovered MOZ), and my brother knew, and continues to know, absolutely nothing about SEO. He simply wrote the content from the perspective of an attorney who had spent the better part of 13 years handling these types of cases. The result? Google: "Los Angeles domestic violence lawyer/attorney", "Los Angeles sex crimes lawyer/attorney", and "Los Angeles homicide attorney." They have held those spots consistently since being published. I know that MANY other factors contribute to the success of content, but at the time I published them we had few links and very little "technical SEO." Unfortunately, I started learning "SEO" and applied standard SEO techniques to future content. The result? Never as good as the articles that were written with no SEO in mind. My purpose in writing this is to help anyone about to tackle a new project or revamp an existing site. Before getting too caught up in the keywords, H tags, and all the other stuff I seem to worry too much about, simply ask yourself - "is this great content?" Thanks again to the MOZ team for the great advice they have shared over the years. Honestly, I think I sometimes become overly reliant on SEO b/c it seems easier than taking the time to write a great piece of content. P.s. Any "SEO" stuff you see on the above-mentioned pages was done by me after the pages ranked well. P.p.s. I don't mean to imply that the above-mentioned pages are perfect, because they are not. My point is that content can rank well even without any emphasis on SEO, as long as the person writing it knows about the subject and takes the time to write something that readers find useful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14403 -
I'm updating content that is out of date. What is the best way to handle if I want to keep old content as well?
So here is the situation. I'm working on a site that offers "Best Of" Top 10 list type content. They have a list that ranks very well but is out of date. They'd like to create a new list for 2014, but have the old list exist. Ideally the new list would replace the old list in search results. Here's what I'm thinking, but let me know if you think theres a better way to handle this: Put a "View New List" banner on the old page Make sure all internal links point to the new page Rel=canonical tag on the old list pointing to the new list Does this seem like a reasonable way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Rotating Content Concern on Deep Pages
Hi there, I apologize if I'm too vague, but this is a tough issue describe without divulging too much of our project. I'm working on a new project which will provide information results in sets of 3. Let's say someone wants to find 3 books that match their criteria, either through their organic search which leads them to us, or through their internal search on our site. For instance, if they're looking for classic movies involving monsters, we might display Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy. We'd list unique descriptions about the movies and include lots of other useful information. However, there are obviously many more monster movies than those 3, so when a user refreshes the page or accesses it again, a different set of results show up. For this example, assume we have 5 results to choose from. So it's likely Google will index different results shuffled around. I'm worried about this causing problems down the line with ranking. The meat and potatoes of the page content are the descriptions and information on the movies. If these are constantly changing, I'm afraid the page will look "unstable" to Google since we have no real static content beyond a header and title tag. Can anyone offer any insight to this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Does having a page that ends with ? cause duplicate content?
I am working on a site that has lots of dynamic parameters. So lets say we have www.example.com/page?parameter=1 When the page has no parameters you can still end up at www.example.com/page? Should I redirect this to www.example.com/page/ ? Im not sure if Google ignores this, or if these pages need to be dealt with. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
What constitutes duplicate content?
I have a website that lists various events. There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012. It will probably happen again sometime in the future too. Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details. In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag. I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content. I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work. Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1