Robin Good: I don't feel particularly good at picking on Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire, which I respect for the good efforts he is placing in promoting, via valuable articles and content, its own curation platform and services, but he offers me the perfect opportunity to highlight a key element about curation, that may otherwise go unnoticed for some more time.
The key point I want to highlight is that Curation done with the goal of obtaining SEO visibility is something altogether different from Curation done with the goal of "making sense", "explaining" or "comprehensively informing on a topic while communicating to a specific audience".
These two different Curation activities are presented and perceived by the novice and the large public as one and the same, but I personally think that the two are not even distant relatives.
While I do not doubt that effective curation can bring (as a consequence) great SEO benefits, I must warn those new to this, about the perils they are going to be meeting if they discard understanding the difference between the value for a search engine (and how much that will stay as is) and the value for true human beings.
Curation done with the explicit goal of doing content marketing is a flawed value creation process and it can survive only as long as there are no true-to-the-meaning high-value curators.
As soon as true "curators" emerge, content curation done for SEO and marketing purposes will rapidly lose its perceived value, as it didn't carry much in the first place by definition, besides producing a "focused" quantity of news on a topic.
The type of advice that Forbes has endorsed by way of this article, is not helping us, as users, get any type of true value from it.
We are not going get less noise, and quality curated news channels of information on something specific we are interested in, but we will rather inundated by an even bigger wave of regurgitated content with no value, insight or perspective added to it.
I understand and respect the need of content marketers to do what they want to do, but I think that it is as much important to explain why content curation is also something altogether different when looked at it with different glasses.
In my opinion, SEO Visibility, increased reputation and authority are and are going to be increasingly directed by the true value served to your specific audience, rather than by the precision and quantity of precisely-targeted keyword-based selected stories that you can put out. Or at least I hope that this will be the case.
The new Google algorithm, first released on Feb.24th of this year with the name Google Panda, seems to be working in making such SEO-based content marketing efforts useless too.
Sadly, the only example given in this Forbes article, to support how successful this SEO-oriented content curation can be, tends to confirm my fears: content curation done for SEO or visibility has nothing to do with content curation intended to provide value, information or insightful understanding of a topic.
See for yourself [from the article]: "Marketers who are curating are seeing improvement in SEO and using those results to evaluate their content curation efforts.
VP of Marketing at Aternity Donna Parent puts it simply: “We are very pleased to be listed organically on the first page of ‘end user experience’ with our site.
[this is the page that includes curated content from Aternity: http://www.aternity.com/news-recent.htm]
That was a key goal that has been sustained since earlier this year (so about 6 months after implementation).
This was and remains a key metric for us and proves the value.”
What do you think? Where do you stand?
Is it all the "same" curation for you?
Via Robin Good
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