For the last few months, I’ve been testing an auto-content service for blog posts.  Gasp!!!  That’s right, I’ve paid for some additional content that gets delivered automatically to my blogs on a daily basis (on 3 of my blogs).  That content is in addition to – and not a replacement for – my original posts.  In fact, I’ve tested several of these services & now I’m even looking at feasibility for it as a future business endeavor.  Here’s why:

Turns out that more content – higher volume – IS really better for your blog.

There’s lots of proof and testing of this concept by others.  Here’s just one I saw recently.

It also turns out that I won’t actually write at that pace.  I won’t.  Love to.  Can’t.

In my case, I’ve got multiple blogs across several different business & personal interests.  I simply can’t write every day on every blog.  And (another blasphemous revelation) I don’t want to!!  Furthermore, there just might be greater opportunities and higher uses of that time.

When I look at this from a reader’s perspective, I think “all they want is good content that is on the subject then were seeking”.  If that’s a personal blog about me, then yes, I guess I’d need to write all of that content (I do that here).  But, if it’s a blog about real estate in a specific market, then certainly there is TONS of content that might be of interest that could be aggregated to the site.  That additional content will keep readers on the site longer and leave them with a better overall impression of my value.  No?

It’s always a fine line for the non-purist.  Just the right mix of great, original thought combined with other high quality material.

I’m writing all of this because I’m really curious what the rest of you think about this subject.  Are you a “purist” who believes that it can only be one voice per blog?  Do you think that maybe this additional content might help to make your site a more interesting place for readers?

I think we’re moving to a place where the best sites will have plenty of original thought/content AND plenty of so-called curated content (stuff that is also on topic for that site). So, now when you visit one of my real estate related blogs, you get my thoughts and opinions and you also get lots of other high-quality, mostly real estate related stuff. Ideally, you’ll also get the original content of other local writers.  All that coming together to create the best possible user experience.

What about SEO

When I started testing this auto-content stuff, I had resigned myself to the fact that it would not help my SEO because it was duplicate content that was being plastered all over the web.  In fact, I considered the fact that it might even hurt my search results if Google decided that I was some kind of black-hat bad guy or whatever.

News Flash: It actually seemed to help my SEO!

The more-than-daily posting frequency that I’m achieving now on these sites seems to have given it more authority on Google?  I’m judging this based on changes to results rankings for some specific searches that I’ve been tracking for several years now.

I don’t presume to understand all of this stuff (I wish some other folks would admit that!).  This conclusion is certainly a bit subjective.  But, sometimes subjective is helpful.  If nothing else, it will lead me to other testing.

What do you say about all this?