Blog content has several issues that need looking at over time. The first is the problem of duplicate content and the second is the issue of new content.
Blogs are popping up everywhere and one of the common practices is to subscribe to RSS feeds and then just reprint any articles of interest from them as their blog content. They are even getting smart now and only taking the first paragraph and using the read more to link back to the source.
This can result in websites with duplicate blog content – in some cases 100% copies. Google now claims to be able to locate the original content and drop any spammed copied from their indexes. You can never be sure.
The second issue of fresh blog content is a little different. Fresh content normally means publishing something new on a regular basis, preferably daily. Sometimes this is just not possible. There are options available can be of help.
Have you ever seen those “Quote of the Day” widgets on blogs? They adds a random quote of the day to each page that the widget appear on. Some work on a time basis, updating every set time period; others update for each visitor that arrives on that page effectively changing the blog content for each visit.
The effect is that every time you arrive on that page, the page will be a little different. The search engine spiders see the same thing. Every time they come to read your pages, the blog content has been changed.
If you can incorporate several different widgets on a page, you can make significant changes to the page which will result in frequent visits from the spiders and frequent reidexing of your pages. This is a great counter to the lack of fresh content on your pages.
It also makes your pages look different to the scrapped pages on another site. If you have incorporated any links back to site in that content (which you can do quite easily within the RSS feed) then Google and the other search engines will see your site as being the original publisher of the content.
As somebody who also writes a marketing blog 5 days a week I’m constantly searching for new ideas. One of my biggest annoyance’s is finding out that some other site has copied my work and not only hidden the link way at the bottom (well past the read more link) but also chosen a different name as the author.