How to Increase Traffic to a News Aggregation Site
Let’s start with a competitor analysis
arabianbusiness.com
Huge traffic potential, but... Arabianbusiness.com has started a long time ago!
Content aggregation is big business at the moment!
Some companies are basing their entire business model around aggregating content. One of the most well-known content aggregator examples is AllTop.com. It was founded by tech legend Guy Kawasaki. AllTop is covering a wide variety of different niches, but there are plenty more content aggregation sites out there that focus on being very, very good at a single thing.
In fact, the best content aggregator sites are so good at what they do that they end up becoming the go-to site in their niche. When that happens, it also means that they’re offering a lot of value to the people who are creating the content in the first place. Why? Because they’re extending the reach of that content and helping to introduce the creators to new readers.
Because of this, content aggregation tools come in useful in a wide variety of situations. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a publisher or whether you’re a brand or a blogger. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about their potential to increase your reach or the fact that they can save huge amounts of time. Content aggregator software has a lot going for it. Let’s take a closer look at what it is and what it does.
Good News!
You can still increase your aggregation website traffic by avoiding duplicate content. Make your news even better by blending some original content with other medias. Use images, videos, custom headlines.
Allow commenting! User-generated content will increase the uniqueness of your site.
Bad News!
Contrary to what many people assume, the biggest challenge isn’t necessarily to setup the APIs and configure the content feeds. The biggest challenge is usually to find some way of adding value to your readers beyond just sharing the aggregated content.
AllTop site has declined in traffic two years ago due to Google algorithm updates.
Conclusion
Once you’ve settled on a content aggregation platform and started publishing content on your website, follow with analytics.
The next one is to monitor the response through your analytics and to test and refine them over time. You can make every decision based on data instead of relying on a gut instinct.
Listen to what your visitors say. Continue to make changes over time to both the content that you aggregate and to the rest of the website. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Good luck.
Be unique! Gain interest! Use content aggregator tools and gain access to a number of news from different publishers.
Avoid duplicated content! This may harm your SEO efforts. Make your news even better by blending some original content.
We try to ignore aggregate content in search
John Muller, Google
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