In this article by Virginia Nussey, they actually do a test of specific content with different types of curation. They then follows how the article SEO ranking changes over time. As common sense would lead you to believe, the article that has curated content, attribution links and original ‘editorial’ content does best – see the quotes and the full article link below
As more and more articles point out, it seems clear that just posting article excerpts doesn’t increase your SEO. But that may not be your focus in curation. I do think that if you have a focus on a very tight niche or market, you can enhance your site with simple curation. Becoming the ‘go to’ spot for news and content can be valuable for your readers or clients. Again, this will probably only work if it is well defined, and you keep up the quality by rigorous screening of the articles that you do post.
If you are doing this well though, why not step it up a notch and add some editorial content? Even if you add content to just a few of the posts, I bet you would see some increase in SEO value. If you are spending the time to filter and post only quality, its not a big step to start writing a little too.
In the first curation variation, auto-generated summaries constitute duplicate content. As might be expected, the post’s ranking dropped from the middle of the pack to the bottom.
In the second curation variation, original content returns to the page in the form of editorialized curation. The curated links are accompanied by original commentary or summary. The page’s ranking jumps to the second spot.
In the final curation variation we tested, we paired an excerpt from the original traditional post with the curated links and enhanced annotations from the previous test. The post reached a #1 ranking.
Our conclusion is that when content curation comes in the form of original content, a website can achieve the benefits of fresh content without threat of negative search engine rankings. The same ranking potential can be gained from curated content with editorialized curation in significantly less time when compared to a traditional blog post.