There are lots of reports telling/selling you to get public domain content on your website because
1. It’s free
2. It’s more content for your page
There are some drawbacks to this if you’re writing on technology issues or internet issues. All the public domain material is not very current technically.
You can’t just “cut and paste” this material onto a page. It may make good search engine fodder if it happens to have some good keywords, but the human reading experience will stink. And it’s the human reader experience that’s importance if you want to sell stuff, get repeat visitors, etc.
But if you had a website devoted to 19th century gardening, for instance, there may be lots of public domain books you could use via Gutenberg.org or even at Google Books. The same goes for lots of topics where the information hasn’t changed much or people want to know how the “old timers” did things.
So
A. Use public domain information wisely and selectively. It may have to be updated significantly to really be more than search engine spam.
B. Use public domain information inspirationally to guide you in building a site overall but realize you need to balance it with your own content.
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