Video To The Rescue: Can Video Save Unique Content Online?

One thing I’ve learned about having lots of websites with unique content is that the content remains unique for only so long. Yes, you can write the content yourself, or pay someone to write it, but that won’t stop someone from ripping off your content and claiming it as their own. This happens all the time and is also a core part of many Blackhat SEO strategies.

The only way to combat this is to use a tool like copyscape and find-out who has stolen your content and try to get it taken-down. However this is a time-consuming process and take it from someone with over 150 active sites out there, it’s impossible to manage.

Now don’t take what I’m saying out of context. By no means am I saying that unique content isn’t important or isn’t valuable. Unique content is still the cornerstone of my SEO strategy. What I am saying is that content duplication can hurt your rankings even though you have no control over it. Don’t panic – it’s not the end of the world nor is it a huge problem…now. However as the Internet continues to grow and people continue to try to find new ways to make money off of websites and domain names this problem will only get worse.

I’m not trying to give a doomsday prediction here, it’s just the truth. The more people that get online, develop sites and are looking for new content, the more potential there is for your content to become theirs. Now in some cases you’ll get credited and this is fine, the search engines shouldn’t penalize you for this, this happens with my blog and many other blogs all the time. As long as a link back to the original article is included with the article then Google says, “okay, this guy didn’t write it, he’s just re-posting an article from another site.” However if no credit is given Google often doesn’t really know which is the duplicate.

So here comes video to the rescue. As you all know I’m a video nut. I love video and feel it is the future of how content will be accessed online. I have a lot of content on You Tube and Vimeo and oftentimes find my videos on random sites. The great thing here is that my content, which is a video of me talking, cannot be duplicated or ripped off.

Just think, you can’t send the video to China and have someone imitate me in the video…it is the most pure unique content there is since you can’t duplicate it. Copy my videos all you want and plaster them on your sites, at the end of the day it’s still me talking, and if I mention a link, or a website that someone should visit, there is no way for someone to change it to go anywhere else.

I’m taking action and I thought I’d include all of you in the adventure. Over the next 6-months I’ll be adding my own custom videos to five of my sites. These will be videos that I create specifically for these sites. I will create a separate You Tube accounts for each site as well to help drive traffic to the site through You Tube. Since You Tube is now the #2 search engine online I think there is a lot of traffic I can bring to my site from my videos. Of course the best part is, nobody can steal my content.

While Google currently has not publicly announced if/how they use videos for ranking one can only imagine that Google likes people creating You Tube videos and putting them on trusted sites. Also there’s no better way to build your brand and connect with customers. There are lots of rumors about Google creating a video search feature that will allow you to search the text spoken in a video…this would also mean that Google could use this text for ranking purposes.

Whether you believe in the online video revolution or not, it’s happening, and the static sites of today are becoming the dynamic sites of tomorrow. The question you have to ask yourself is, “what am I doing to stay ahead of the curve?”

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton