For Google, the Only Content is Useful Content
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently said, “We have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search results that we can find.”
Google constantly changes its algo to provide info that’s relevant and useful to users, as quickly as possible. What ranked well last year might not rank so well this year. As they put it themselves, “We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards.”
Here’s what I mean: You can hire a copywriter to spin content for $10/hour (or maybe less), just so you can add more content to your blog and get more internal links to your important pages. But Google can look at that and decide, “Another waste dump; not interested.” It’s your responsibility to keep your pages up-to-date and relevant – for your customers and prospects, as well as for the search engines.
Simply put, Google will not index every piece of content for a number of reasons:
- Server space isn’t free.
- Google is getting faster (Caffeine) and that means more efficient at identifying high-quality, useful, fresh content.
- Even if junk content gets indexed, it might not pass through Google’s other filters that allow it to rank in the search results.
- Just because you see over a million results for a search query doesn’t mean there are literally a million search results – that’s an estimation (see Stephan Spencer’s post: Results 1 – 10 of about 23,850,000,000. Yeah, right. http://www.stephanspencer.com/search-engines/results-1-10-of-about-23850000000-yeah-right).
Perhaps Google’s algo is a bit more complex than you anticipated, and you can’t game the search results, after all. Knowing that Google’s search engineers comprise many PhDs, how can you help Google make their search engine better? Take a tip from Google’s own book regarding content: Keep up with current developments and what works for business, making sure your site reflects both, and:
Consider the rise and power of social media today
It occurred to me, while reading How Customer Engagement will determine Winning Brands in the Social Era, that engagement is the reason social media was created. And it’s swept the Internet.
Consumers know much more about marketing than businesses realize. That’s why we still see lame “Look at how great we are” advertising – stuff that doesn’t interest people, get them talking and certainly not taking action. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons social media is so popular, because consumers are in control of the advertising they are willing to see (or not see), and have been in control for quite some time. This “new phenomenon” in advertising isn’t going away.
So what makes a piece of content a success for the business?
Joel Spolsky, in his final editorial with Inc. Magazine, shares this idea: A blog that generates leads and sales has to be about something bigger than the product, service or the company. Yes, it takes real discipline not to post about yourself. “It has to be about your readers, who will, it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome,” he wrote.
For example, if you are a plumber, don’t write about your long list of certifications and years of experience. That’s all about you.
Instead, write the definitive article on how to prevent pipes from freezing in your home or office. For the next several years, when the forecast is sub-freezing temperatures, anyone interested in protecting their property (or dealing with burst pipes) will find your article in Google. Helping your users solve a problem and head off a property catastrophe is likely to attract readers who need your plumbing expertise.
That’s the point of a useful piece of content. Writing about experience and certifications has its place, but it’s meaningless until someone recognizes that you can help them solve the problem they have right now. Engaging content like that gives a business instant credibility from those it has helped.
Yes, useful content is part of Google’s algo, but isn’t that what you want to spend your time and money creating anyway? The bigger question might be, “Once I’ve got useful content, how do I get the most out of it?”
Tom Shivers is an SEO professional and founder of Capture Commerce. To find out how to get killer content or exploit your existing relevant content, contact Capture Commerce.
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19 Responses to “For Google, the Only Content is Useful Content”
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Tho, we tend to always use unique content ourselves, self-serving articles like this still insult our intelligence. Google has not, does not, and will not anytime soon, IMO, be able to filter spun content worth a damn. It gets indexed fine, ranks fine, and it’s links can count just as well as any 100% unique pages will count. Please, don’t write articles that are self serving Tom, write ones that actually help newbies, not give them even more misleading information.
Sorry this article wasn’t useful to you William. Spinning content is controversial among SEO pros, so glad you read my take on it.
The primary reason I wrote this article was to address a common problem I see with some of my clients: laziness when it comes to content development. Ever see anything like that?
QUOTE
“That’s the point of a useful piece of content. Writing about experience and certifications has its place, but it’s meaningless until someone recognizes that you can help them solve the problem they have right now.”
This is a good quote. Write often; write well; write with relevance.
Admittedly it’s often easier said than done, but it’s the way to go.
William,
So you would encourage newbie SEOs to duplicate content, as it’s not worth writing your own? Not a good habit to get into.
Nice article Tom
@Chris, I am with William, and you can be sure that he would never advise a newbie to duplicate content or so ever. Just to make things clear here.
I was filling all morning DMCAs against content thefts who are ranking right beneath me, for some of my articles with my original title and some with modified titles only. Content 100% duplicated. And those pages had green pixels in the PR bar.
Therefore looking at some hours old facts , the information presented in the article is not accurate and in fact it is misleading, even if that was not necessarily the intention of Tom.
@Tom, Controversial among SEO pros? Did you probably want to say “controversial among SEO pros and wannabes?
@Webnauts it sounds like you are saying it’s better to have mediocre content (whether it’s duplicated or not) that isn’t interesting and doesn’t attract authoritative links to it. Then, you probably end up pushing and bugging people and sending out spam emails asking for links and stuff like that.
My approach is much different, but please do write your own article about your approach and post it here so we can see and judge accordingly.
@Tom it sounds like you did not understand my point. I am strictly against low quality or duplicated content. And in my 10 years career I never asked anyone for a link and never paid for one. And I will never do!
I wrote my own articles on my sites, the ones on my web site clicking on my username here and especially on my other site webnauts.net. And if you look at the IBLs of my second site, you will realize that I am a natural link building advocate.
I agree with your points against low quality or duplicated content, but I do no agree with your claims that Google filters duplicated content. Should I post the links of the sites who copied my content and I which I reported this morning?
You said: Server space isn’t free.
Why don’t you talk about helping Google simply implementing 304 HTTP headers, gzip compressions, etc? OK, maybe this will go too far.
@webnauts you misinterpreted my claim.
Webnauts Reply:
April 21st, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Did I? If so, please accept my apologies. The last days I am brain-dead because I am redesigning my site and re-building my SEO tool which I hope I will launch tomorrow or the day after, and I just can’t think straight anymore.
I think I should revisit the topic tomorrow and continue from there.
I will say fresh contents and which are unique….frankly i have seen my blogs posts ranking even in top 10 for my website as well as for clients.
So it means that contents are being given most weight and due to this i do write around 4 posts daily
Webnauts Reply:
April 22nd, 2010 at 3:03 pm
And how long do your new blog posts rank in the first 10 SERPs?
Nice article.Keep write on this….
Thanks for the sharing. Keep it continue…………..
@Sarita Rawat and @Savita Bisht, are you also one of those wannabes, scammers or self-claimed SEOs? If not, you should have known already that your comments are defined by Google as “comment spam”. You can be very happy that you had the great luck that “Daily SEO Tip” attributes contributors links with the “nofollow” attribute. If your intention was purely promotional, I think the members here should know by now what you are up to.
Google says that spamming other sites can lower your site rankings http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/hard-facts-about-comment-spam.html
So please give up this ridiculous garbage! You only people off and you do not attract them to click on your link.
Dear Admins and members,
Sarita Rawat and Savita Bisht is the same person owning two different web sites and the best, he is obviously from India!
Be careful everybody!!!
Sorry, but you are giving Google way too much credit. I am seeing lots of content farm sites getting good rankings lately. Given that they are focused on generating revenue from Adsense, Google makes more money by ranking these content farms above merchants. Also, the quality of the content is sometimes pretty good, so it not a terrible user experience.
ok but what about spinning……its the same article with different order of words use!What happens with that?
google now let you block results from some pages….and a lot of people believe that pages been blocked for seeral users google will dicrease their pr
none page i think as a n article have today read will be dicreased in pr…as if you block it in google results