Content aggregation – who, in their right mind, would bother building such site? Take this email we received today from beautynewsfeed.com. I can tell you that this website receives very, very  little traffic from Google, despite all its apparent content. The SEO plot is blatant, and still it saddens me to see that such sites manage to convince many, many, many bloggers to add them to their website. The SEO plot is very simple: making bloggers believe that having excepts of their sites added to a site aggregator will drive traffic to theirs, thinking that, “after all, there is a lot of content there, so it must be a great source of traffic for my site.”.

Dear beauty bloggers and bloggers of all kinds, it is my duty to tell you not to link out to these sites. Blog aggregators are asking for what we call in our SEO jargon “link juice”. Once they have enough links, their PageRank will rise, and so will their relevance to the eyes of Google. As a result, there is a risk in the long term that Google finds their site before it finds yours when users look for things – i.e. they want to grab what we call long tail search traffic – your search traffic. Why are they doing that? To sell ads and make money.

So don’t be fooled, these blog aggregators will never bring any significant traffic to your site. Because their primary aim is to sell ads, not to bring traffic to your site. On top of this, Google is increasingly identifying their content as duplicate, therefore making them irrelevant and invisible – which is why they need hundreds of blogs linking to them, in the hope to be able to beat Google. However their plot is becoming too obvious to search engines.

My word of advice? Don’t bother with them, they are time wasters, and they WILL decrease the power of your blog if you link out to them.