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Posted on • Originally published at octoparse.com

Why Content Aggregation Tools Are Important to Every Website

Table of Contents

  • Why content aggregation tools important
  • The difference between aggregation and plagiarism
  • What is a content aggregation tool
  • Content sources and content aggregation tools
  • Conclusion

On average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second. High ranking content is a powerful engine of attracting traffic, increasing retention rate, and conversion for a website. However, for most websites, it is not an easy task to produce high-quality content regularly due to different kinds of limits.

Why Content Aggregation Tools Important

This is why content aggregation tools have become very important to every website these days. With a content aggregation tool, you can gather a lot of content in one day without putting too much manpower on it.

If you haven’t used any content aggregation tool or do not know the benefits of it, think about these questions:

Without high-quality updates, how can people find your website using Google? If you’re not sharing new or trending content on your website or social media, why will people follow your page? If you’re not providing useful content to help your target audience to solve their problem, why will they buy from you?

The difference between content aggregation and content plagiarism

A lot of people may think that using content aggregation tools to gather content for their websites is a kind of content plagiarism. While, don’t rush a conclusion. Content aggregation is a process of compiling information on any topic for one or more related keywords and publishing them on your websites, platforms, social media pages or blogs. While content plagiarism is an act of taking someone’s work, claiming it to be yours.

Publishing the content (citing the source when necessary) you gather with a content aggregation tool won’t take away the credits of the original writers. Click this content aggregation site to test away. You’ll know how content aggregation can benefit both the platform users and original writers. The concept behind content aggregation is to provide users with rich information that would have been hard to find.

What is a content aggregation tool?

A content aggregation tool is an application or website that can help you collect content from a wide range of platforms and then republish all the content into one place. There are many types of content aggregation tools specializing in collecting different kinds of content(sports news, finance news, and game news, etc.) or content formats (video, blogs, podcasts, pictures, and so on.).

It is obvious that you can’t use one content aggregation tool to fit all your content needs. Selecting your content aggregation toolkit depends on which sources you plan to pull content from and whether the tool supports those platforms. We will cover more information on different types of aggregators and content sources in the upcoming session.

Content Sources and Content Aggregation Tools

There are many sources of high-quality content and content aggregation tools in the market to help you with content curation and aggregation on your website. We’ve picked five top-rated recommendations for your aggregation project.

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a unique type of content aggregation tool. It’s a free web crawler. Instead of providing content, it helps people who have a need for massive content sources to collect content from any websites.

You can use it to scrape a great deal of content from Reddit, Medium, The New Yorker, just to name a few. Then you can upload the scraped content to your CMS as your content repository for use when you need new content. Besides, it can also help you gather information from social media to help you monitor trending topics and people’s interests.

2. Google News

Google News is one of the easiest sources to set up as a content aggregation tool to collect feed around a specific topic. It “presents a continuous, customizable flow of articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines.” To use Google News as your content aggregation tool, you need an API to connect your CMS to Google News.

3. Netvibes

Netvibes is a dashboard of everything, delivering social media and brand monitoring, news aggregation, drag-and-drop analytics and data visualization—all in one easy-to-use and fully customizable platform. Netvibes’ personalized dashboards enable users to listen, learn and act on everything that matters to them online.

4. Digg

Digg is a social network and news aggregating site, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. This website is great for content inspiration.

If you can’t find anything interesting to write, take a moment to read some of its articles. It will inspire you. It doesn’t support API connection at the moment. If you want content from them, you need to take some time to contact time for content citing permission.

5. Castbox

Castbox is a rich podcast database and is also a great source for content aggregation you can’t miss. It offers access to over 95 million audio content including podcasts, audiobooks, FM radio and more in 27 different countries on your devices.

You can use it to discover popular podcasts on various topics including News, Music, Business, Games, etc. If you’re searching for podcast sources for your target audience, Castbox is definitely a good choice.

Conclusion

To evaluate a content aggregation tool is to see whether it can gather the information you need intelligently and effortlessly. You may already have your own sources to get the wanted content or you may try above. The key is to choose the right content aggregation tool and Octoparse, specialized in web scraping, could be the surprise for you.

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