How Google is forcing people to create better content and improve previously created content in order to rank better in search.
As much as this statement will anger many, I believe it’s true. At least from a content perspective. Here's why…
Search engine optimizers (SEO’s) are constantly searching for ways to boost their clients’ websites in search results. Years ago it was somewhat easy since you could stuff keywords throughout a website and build backlinks through business citations, social bookmarking and blog comments.
#1 Way Google Is Making the Internet Better: Websites Content Must Improve
Then Google made it more difficult by eliminating much of the value received from those mostly outdated techniques. Google’s algorithm changes started to require a website to actually have its own unique content. So SEO’s helped their clients by creating custom content for websites including page copy, articles and blog posts. The hope was that Google would index the content, read it as quality content and boost the website in search results. The website could now be ranked higher because it had “fresh” content and that content could actually rank as well on it’s own (because Google doesn’t rank websites, it ranks pages of websites).
#2 Way Google Is Making the Internet Better: An Army of Content Creators
But then everyone started creating content covering every topic possible in order to get their website to rank better. SEO’s helped content creators, webmasters and business owners by telling them what topics to cover that had lots of search traffic and low competition (meaning not many web pages had covered that topic yet). So Google now had anyone who wanted their website to rank better in search (which is pretty much anyone who profits off people finding their website), creating good content to answer any search topic (whether related or not).
#3 Way Google Is Making the Internet Better: A Proper Article, Image or Video for Every Search
Now we seem to be approaching a time when every possible topic is covered by an article, blog, infographic or video that has been uploaded to the web. Google has harnessed the power of creators all over the world to populate the web to answer its search queries. And it rewards these creators by ranking the content higher in search. How does it judge the quality of the content? By the amount of websites that link back to the content. So hopefully if you create great content and share it, people will link to it and you’ll rank higher in Google due to the backlinks received.
But now what…
#4 Way Google Is Making the Internet Better: Continuous Improvement of Each Article, Image or Video
So what happens now when the searches you want to rank for have already been covered somewhere else by great content? Well...You make the content even better! SEO’s now are researching which websites are linking to pieces of content covering certain topics for which they want to rank. Then they review the content in question and work hard to make it better. (The average blog post now takes 3.5 hours to write
not including data research and custom image/video creation). No more spending 30 minutes to an hour making a great post about the history of hairless cats for a pet shop. You now need to spend three to five hours or more to provide an article with more value (meaning better research, newer data and more insight) to stand a chance that the website linking to the previous post on hairless cats will change to your post.
So that’s the work of SEO’s, working to create even better content to replace less-valuable content so that websites will link to this new content over the old content (that's a lot of "content"). Google has now forced us to continually rewrite the internet with improved content that is more valuable than the previous content. And we do it because we want to provide value to our clients. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so as long as the content being created IS actually valuable and improves upon current content holding the top spots.
What’s Next?
Is there a time when this will end? NO! Because content can always be improved. Data changes, stats change, trends change and mediums for delivering information change as well. A blog post about hairless cats can be turned into a beautiful infographic. An infographic can be turned into an explanatory GIF or short motion graphic video. Going even further, you could create a short film or full feature film about a topic to improve the content even further. Is that the peak? NO! Someone else can come along and create an even better film. I mean, just look at how many times Batman and Spiderman movies have been remade.
So there is always going to be room for improved content on the web. And as long as Google rewards us for creating better content by ranking highly “linked-to “content and web pages containing that content higher in search, people will continue to improve upon it.
Ps. Does anyone know any hairless cats available for a short film I’m working on?
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