Video transcription
Today’s question comes from New Delhi, India.
Rajesh asks, “Hi, Matt. Can a site still do well in Google if I copy only a small portion of content from different websites and create my own article by combining it all, considering I will mention the source of that content by giving their URLs in the article?”
I fear you might be heading for heartbreak, Rajesh, so let me walk you through this.
Yahoo, especially, used to really hate this particular technique. They called it stitching.
If it was two or three sentences from one article,and two or three sentences from another article,and two or three sentences from another article,they really considered that spam.
If all you’re doing is just taking quotes from everybody else, that’s probably not a lot of added value.
So I would really ask yourself, are you doing this automatically? Why are you doing this?
People don’t just like to watch a clip show on TV.They like to see original content.
So they don’t want to just see an excerpt and then a one line, and then an excerpt and then a one line,and that sort of thing.
Now it is possible to pull together a lot of different sources and generate something really nice,but you’re usually synthesizing.
For example, Wikipedia will have stuff that’s notable about a particular topic,and they’ll have their sources noted.And they cite all of their sources there.And they synthesize a little bit.It’s not like they’re just copying the text.But they’re sort of summarizing or presenting as neutral of a case as they can.
That’s something that a lot of people really enjoy.
And if that’s the sort of thing you’re talking about, that would probably be fine.But if you’re just wholesale copying sections from individual articles, that’s probably going to be a higher risk area.
And I might encourage you to avoid that if you can.
Quick Answer: No