If Fresh Content Is King: Yahoo Is Building a Dynasty
You’ve been told by SEO experts to keep your website content fresh, and you installed an easy-to-use CMS so your marketing team can add fresh content. Maybe you even launched a blog to make your site more “search engine friendly.” Is it really worth all the extra effort?
Yes, and here’s proof that content is king: Yahoo! recently purchased Associated Content, a website with user-generated content, for an estimated $100 million. The search engine finds fresh content so valuable that rather than simply indexing it, they opted to own it. Don’t forget Google purchased YouTube a few years ago for $1.65 billion. A stream of content is worth something these days.
Founded in 2005, Associated Content has 380,000+ contributors who upload articles and videos of fresh content on almost any topic you can imagine. The site gets 10,000 new pieces of content each week! Interestingly enough, much of the traffic to Associated Content is from Google. Since Yahoo! and Bing decided to team up in the search engine battle, it’s interesting to see them gobbling up content that Google thinks is link worthy.
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz called the purchase of content a “game-changer.”
“Together, we’ll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network. These are important aspects of building engaging consumer experiences on Yahoo!, and one of the reasons why we’re one of the most visited destinations online.”
What does the race for fresh content mean for corporate websites?
It’s more affirmation that your custom, local content has value in a global world. What’s your CEO’s opinion of content and SEO? How do your services help your customers or the community in ways that are interesting to people searching online? Keep creating and uploading articles, blog posts and video with the confidence that what you’re creating has value. The search engines want it because your customers want it too.
