Create original content or Copy from several sources?

[moneymm22]

I own a site that that has about 15,000 pages that need some description content.  I plan to hire someone to retrieve or create content for each of these pages on my site.

each page needs about 500 words.

I was thinking that there is probably three ways i can go about this.

If I hire someone cheap I can probably have them copy data from about 20 different sites. using about 5 sources for each page description.

I can hire someone that has some experience writing english content, and have them go to a few sites and then in their own words summarize the description on my site.

I can hire a great content writer, have them do research on each page, and create completely unique content.

I probably will do some combination of these 3 things. (great content writer on a few pages, since thats all i can afford to do) and the rest do the cheaper route.

Is copying sentences from multiple sources a good idea? or does the content really need to be original?

[ChrisAshton]

hey, sorry just catching up on these after a busy week!

I figured i would start with having someone write unique content for me for the top 100. and for the rest find someone really inexpensive to go out and copy information

This plan is perfectly fine until the words "copy information"

If you're copy/pasting content from other sites then you're really going to hurt your potential to rank. Rather than doing this, my suggestion would be to either put that budget you were going to spend on copy/pasting into having that person write more pages, OR have the second person use the first writer's first 100 as a reference point for how the other pages should read then write them for you.

Since duplicate content will essentially be ignored, you're better off with no content than a site full of duplicates - at least the no content option is free!

maybe use an online tool that modify's some of the words

This is what we refer to as "content spinning" and is an old tactic that no longer works. Even if the content is spun enough to be seen as unique, it will be so unreadable that you'll suffer for low quality content instead.

if they grab the descriptions from a 3-5 sites, then maybe google wont consider it duplicate content.

This won't actually help you either. Search engines aren't looking for completely duplicated websites, they're looking for duplicate content. Even if your content came from a mix of 1000 different websites, it would still be seen as duplication.

Overtime if i have success with the top 100, i will add another 100 or so every month.

Nothing wrong with that at all.

When it comes to SEO you basically have 2 choices. Either cheat the system and likely see great gains for a short period of time (black hat) or you can focus on offering excellent, unique value and an experience that users want to return for (white hat). Content spinning & copy/pasting from multiple websites definitely falls under the "cheat the system" category.

[moneymm22]

I figured i would start with having someone write unique content for me for the top 100. and for the rest find someone really inexpensive to go out and copy information, and maybe use an online tool that modify's some of the words. also if they grab the descriptions from a 3-5 sites, then maybe google wont consider it duplicate content.

Overtime if i have success with the top 100, i will add another 100 or so every month.

good plan?

[ChrisAshton]

This is a tough but common problem. In the perfect world, you'd hire a team of high quality content writers on a contract to populate each of these pages with genuine, unique content.

Since this isn't the perfect world, you're probably on a budget that doesn't allow this to happen. Assuming your site is already live, that means you no longer have to deal with the "push it live with sparse pages or spend a few more months preparing properly" conundrum.

That being the case, my suggestion here is always to just do it properly and it takes however long it takes. Assuming you've had the site up like this for some time, your rankings are unlikely to drop in the next month or so. Start populating content from the top down, namely from your primary landing pages to your category pages, subcategory pages then finally the individual products.

In my experience, ~300-500 words seems to be sufficient for a product page so you may be able to stretch that budget with a good writer to maybe 4 or 5 pages, maybe. It's more about offering value that an arbitrary word count anyhow.

You could always get them to do the first few and you follow their lead from there, perhaps getting them to proof-read the first 10 descriptions that you write? Not ideal and I'd only attempt this if your writing abilities are ok (they seem to be?). If you're going to go this route, I'd suggest using Grammarly to keep an eye on your spelling and grammar for you as well - it can integrate with Word if that's your tool of choice or you can type straight into their web app.

Anyhow, back on topic, doing it this way means your most valuable/sold/profitable products will be getting content first and you're not compromising on quality. We've done exactly this with a number of medium sized ecommerce sites and the results are always great (albeit in conjunction with other work we're doing). Naturally, the faster the better but you have to start somewhere.

There was a Whiteboard Friday on this exact topic and I think I just found it but the video is broken and it was old so they don't have the transcript The closest I could find was this one which is also quite old but worth watching. Don't forget that Google's intention is to ignore duplicated content so if you're just copying from other sites, there's a good chance you just won't rank with those pages.

Hope that helps!

[MoosaHemani]

From descriptions, if you are talking about Meta descriptions, than I would second the advice given by Rebeeca. Meta description does have a value when it comes to increasing CRT for your website but from the SEO standpoint, I don’t see it as a major ranking factor.

Again, as it plays an important role in increase CTR, I will never recommend you copying or writing low quality descriptions. So, idea is to go slow but go quality so that you can win more potential users to click on your website.

From the SEO prospective, I am dead sure that there is low to no ranking benefits with well-crafted meta descriptions.

Just a thought!

[moneymm22]

I have other content that is valuable to my user, but a description that other sites also have would also add value for my user.  but im really only gathering it for SEO reasons.  I just dont know the best way to approach this mammoth task.

[BradsDeals]

It it's not 100% unique content that adds value to the page for the user, then it's not worth spending time or money creating it. Period. Do not copy from other websites, ever. Scaling page content is hard, it sucks, and did I mention it's hard? But there is no shortcut to this.