Must Market

What Is Content Curation?
I don't agree with much of this article, but then I would never suggest "curation" purely as a form of content build. Yes some curation such as Top 10 lists come close to the kind of "no value add" content Matt Cutts warns about, but as long as your website isn't 90% that kind of content you can afford a list or two or five.

My key disagreement is over what constitutes "curation". Curation requires some filtering and positioning. Yes it is possible to stop there, but most curators place their curated content in some context. They write editorial to wedge their content into their mix.

This "rich snippet" approach to curation creates the logic behind the curation. This post on Scoop.it is a "rich snippet" where I'm adding my two cents worth.

Note too that I add editorial into a theme - content marketing and SEO - I comment and write about frequently. This means my "modeled" ecosystem shows consistent investment and confirmation from links, likes and shares.

I wrote about how feeds are in all of our content marketing future (http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-feeds-are-in-your-future.html ) and think I missed the importance of social signals when I wrote that post. Feeds absent confirming social signals are just useless noise (as Cutts all but declares in the video on the linked post).

Function as "junior-Google" doesn't work UNLESS you have the editorial chops to support it as my friend Mark Traphagen (@MarkTraphagen) does on G+ and my friend Phil Buckley (@19818) does on SEO.

Mark can "curate" related G+ content without his authority taking a hit because his curation is a tiny fraction of his content. Even though Mark can afford some % of comment less curation I doubt he would. Mark likes to add rich snippets to place his curation into his overall context - as so should we all.

Bottom line is don't put content on your site that is duplicated. Use "no follow" tags or canonical URLs to show Google your intent are pure and you are only after the rankings your links, likes and loves generate.