OK, who’s the funny guy? Who told everyone to “keep writing content” so that Google will rank your site?
Writers, content marketers, and SEO’s are in the midst of a ridiculous race to create content and are being told that this is “good for SEO.”
The interwebs are flooding with crap and it is multiplying every day, it is a huge mess.
Somewhere along the line some genius SEO started telling everyone to write as much low-quality content as possible to trigger Google’s “frequency signal” and get your site ranked higher.
Google, amongst others have created a self-perpetuating myth that is driving ill-qualified people to write shitty content about things that don’t matter to get their sites ranked higher in the search engines.
The internet marketing industry is probably the biggest perpetrator of this offense. Thousands of SEO and IM blogs are filled to the brim with posts that are rewrites of rewrites of rewrites being spun 7 ways to Sunday. Major online publications are even falling victim to this myth and are being called out for it openly.
Google ranks quality content backed by domain authority and other signals, not sites that merely have “lots of articles.”
Does your roofer really need a blog?
Your florist doesn’t need a Livejournal.com site either.
Your electrician doesn’t need a Tumblr.
Your dog walker does not need to be doing 1 blog post per day on his WordPress site and posting it to his Twitter account with 1000 fake followers..
I will admit, I was guilty of all of this for a long time. I’ve written more roofing/dog walker/electrician posts than I care to admit.
It has to stop. I’m not saying blogging isn’t good, but this floodgate of content somehow needs to be tamed.
We are polluting the internet
As an internet marketer, I see search results and websites than the average internet user. I can spot a piece of content that was created just for the sake of creating content a mile away.
10 years ago, the search results were much easier to be manipulated, but the results were much cleaner. There weren’t people out there writing posts on “how to use deodorant” or any of this “thin content” that we are seeing today.
It pains me to walk through the local library and peek at the monitors of the elderly. They search the internet using the default web browser and are forced to either sift through dozens of low quality posts or worse ― read them and take action based on misinformation they’ve read within the blog post.
are you kidding me?????
Conclusion
Yes, Google likes content and it also likes sites that are updated frequently. But Google also likes about million other ranking factors including bounce rate from terrible blog posts.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of content marketing. I’ve seen more results in the past year from content marketing efforts than any other tactic.
Write only when something needs to be written. Don’t just write because it is part of your content strategy.
Write content only when you can truly visualize it being shared, enjoyed, and appreciated by your target user group.
Get Social!