Is it a good practice to combine small portions of content from other sites?

Many affiliate marketers are concerned about copied content may affect their online marketing strategy. This video released by Matt Cutts speaks about the negative aspect of being into the habit of getting small portions of information from particular sites and then combining them to form another article which has no original content from the person doing it. Matt Cutts directly answered it as a faulty practice.

What do search engines think about copied content?

• Yahoo dislikes this strategy of creating an article and considered it spam and thus invented the word “stitching” for it.
• Google is also displeasured by this act of article writing.

The two types of content sorting prevalent today are:

Curated content

This is a type of content formed from relevant information to a certain topic which are collected and organized into one to form a new article. This includes the very own thought of the writer/curator. The process involved is called synthesizing or summarizing a topic and showcasing the best part of the material resource while contributing your own ideas. This content has a place in the Google ranking.

Aggregated content

This is the second type of content where the writer does not include his unique ideas to the new article. The writer is just merely pulling information from resources and putting them together to form a new article. The process involved is called stitching or joining together information gathered from resources as they are without incorporating new ideas to the article. This might be considered useful to readers but will not find its place in Google. 

To improve your SEO ranking, you should:

• Remember that Google highly discourage taking contents from other sites and making it your own. Thus, avoid using copied or unoriginal article contents and integrating it in your web page or site. This will be recognized by major search engines and could put your site in the lowest rank of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
• Make your own original and unique article or come up with new and innovative write-ups that could further boost the richness and quality of your website content. High quality and excellent contents for your web page would also mean higher page ranking in major search engines particularly Google.
• Know the difference between curated and aggregated contents and how articles with these types of essence or quality could essentially bring you nowhere in your Google page ranking. Research more for fresher ideas instead of these contents.