There's always a lot of talk online (by people who like to guess at Google's search algorithms, and general "leaders of the SEO pack") aboutGoogle's New SEO rules: how to follow them correctly or, from the unfortunate "black hat" types - how to break them.

Considering the fact that the search engine is the ultimate judge as to how you will rank, it makes sense to me that you should follow their rules. As Search Engine Industry leader, Google's new SEO rules (the "Penguin" update) is proof of how you can get burnt by not following sound SEO principles.

And if you've hired an SEO Marketing firm, it's up to you to protect your company's online integrity. Make sure you ask your SEO marketing team how they are following honourable SEO principles.

In the Penguin law, everyone who has been posting duplicate content just to increase their organic SEO rank is going to be penalised (eventually) for not providing unique content.

Unique content = content that does not exist (word-for-word) elsewhere.

Do you have to write everything yourself now?

Of course you can still reference great content (videos, photos, blogs, comments...) that exist elsewhere. You can still do reviews as part of your content marketing strategy. But you cannot copy whole chunks of text. It's safest to write your own intro/review and provide a link to the original content.

Remember, Google is a librarian. For the same reasons librarians want it to be easy for you to find the right book, Google wants their Internet searchers to find the best link after a keyword/keyphrase search.

As an international (Toronto; Ottawa; Melbourne) copywriter, I really like the summary given in Ocean Feather's blog May 19, 2012  which focuses the argument for good SEO principles on Google's motto, "don't be evil."  Next Post: "What does it mean 'to be evil' in Content Marketing?"