The SEO industry, like many others, has private forums, chat threads and groups of connected individuals whose interactions happen largely behind closed doors. Today, I'd like to pull back a curtain and share a debate that occurred between a number of CEOs in the search marketing industry over the last few days that I think you'll find both fascinating, and hopefully, valuable, too.
The topic is the concept that content quality is highly correlated or predictive of high rankings in the search engines. This isn't a cut-and-dry debate, but a more nuanced and, yes, subjective look at content quality from a wide range of perspectives.
First, I'll introduce our players (these are just the folks who agreed to have their contributions published), after which we can dive into the discussion:
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Stephan Spencer is VP of SEO Strategies at Covario, co-author of The Art of SEO, founder of Netconcepts (recently acquired by Covario), and inventor of the GravityStream SEO proxy technology (now rebranded as Covario's Organic Search Optimizer). |
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Gord Hotchkiss is the President and CEO of Enquiro, author of the BuyerSphere Project and a leading expert and research on online and search user behavior. |
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Thad Kahlow is the CEO of BusinessOnLine, one of the nation’s leading online marketing agencies, successfully launching hundreds of solutions for clients including American Red Cross, Caterpillar, Sony, NEC, Sybase, and Hasbro, to name a few. |
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Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting, a 16 person SEO and PPC consulting firm with offices in Boston and Northern California. Eric is co-author of The Art of SEO from O'Reilly. |
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Chris Baggott co-founded ExactTarget and authored the popular book: Email Marketing By The Numbers. He is currently co-founder/CEO of Compendium an Enterprise Social Content Publishing software and writes about Best Practices for Blogging on his own blog. |
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Richard Zwicky the Founder and President of Eightfold Logic (formerly known as Enquisite), a predictive insights and search and social analytics platform used by enterprises and agencies around the world. A serial entrepreneur, Richard is the author of multiple patents and has been involved in online marketing since the late 1990's.
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Lawrence Coburn is the CEO and co-founder of DoubleDutch - the first white label geolocation platform. He is also an Editor at The Next Web's geolocation blog, and a mentor at io ventures - a San Francisco based startup incubator. |
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Will Critchlow is a co-founder of Distilled, a London & Seattle based SEO consultancy. He speaks regularly at industry conferences on analytics, data-driven optimization and data visualization. |
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Rand Fishkin is... the author of this post :-) |
Thad Kahlow (in reference to these three posts):
Great Content ≠ Great Rankings
We disagree. Great content is so important to ranking well. It may not be the only factor, that content has to be found, be newsworthy and incorporate keywords that will drive traffic but the basic principle that content is a huge factor to generate competitive rankings.
Rand Fishkin:
Great content ≠ Great Rankings
I'll fight tooth and nail on this one. Great content is a really good thing to do for many reasons, but I'd doubt it correlates to great rankings any better than PageRank does (or doesn't).
Eric Enge:
Speaking of fighting tooth and nail, you have now earned my $0.02 (:>). Great content may not equate to great rankings by itself, but if we look at the integrated whole of a web marketing strategy, where link building and social media promotion are the driving components of success, great content is a MUST. I think it would be a disservice to put anything out there that suggests otherwise. Accordingly, I would suggest:
"In the absence of a marketing strategy to leverage it, great content will not necessarily drive great rankings, but if you are looking to create a major web property (for your market space) then great content is a requirement. It's impact on the promotion of your web site is fundamental. Obtaining links and getting positive feedback from social media communities is far easier with great content."
Stephan Spencer:
Great content doesn't automatically mean great rankings. In other words, it is not a foregone conclusion that great content will necessarily rank just because of its quality. The content may deserve to be ranked, but if no one knows about it, or if the site architecture is so atrocious that it repels the spiders, then it won’t rank. It’s as important to actively promote that great content as to have created it. I’m simply making an argument against that tired old phrase “Build it and they will come.” Don’t let my comments dissuade you from creating high quality content though! Indeed, it’s a likely prerequisite for SEO success, especially when the keywords being targeted are highly competitive.
Chris Baggott:
So if Eric is $0.02.....I'm $0.001 :-)
I'd like to chime in on the content question. Isn't this an issue of competition?
I wrote a post talking about one of Rand's slides at Web 2.0 showing 4 word phrases being the highest converting. We took a look at our own client base and found exactly the same correlation. The client I use in the example has decent domain authority but not much else other than content and categories specifically relevant to the longer tail terms they are targeting. When we talk about SEO don't we need to differentiate the fat head tactics from the long tail tactics?
Rand you made a great case for the long tail and conversion in your deck. Vanessa Fox in her new book makes the statement that 56% of all searches return no ads. As the world starts to appreciate that the tail is only going to get longer it seems like content is going to be getting more an more important. Am I crazy making the assumption that the lower the query competition the bigger the role of content relevance, recency and frequency plays in driving high converting traffic?
Rand Fishkin:
Agreed - for the long tail, domain authority + enough juice to get lots of pages indexed + the mere mention of the phrase combo = you're often ranking top 5
Eric - agree with you as well, it certainly makes many things easier, but so many people in our industry (and outside of it) think and promote the idea that "great content" (which, IMO, has been repeated so often it's nearly lost meaning) will get you rankings. Great marketing will get you rankings, often regardless or in spite of content quality.
Lawrence Coburn:
I agree wholeheartedly. To do well in the tail, you need deep (though not necessarily high quality) content. To match 4-5-6 word queries at scale, you need to have a lot of content to draw from.
On a related note, the May Day update changed something around exactly these sorts of queries, and for us, not for the better. I'm curious as to where the traffic that was going to us, and other big, broad, content sites, is now going.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah - we also took about a 10% hit in the tail of search traffic from Google to seomoz.org and that was weird. Previous updates have always only helped us do better or stayed the same. Digging into traffic data, it appears to be fewer pages receiving any traffic, which tells me it's most likely an indexation issue - Google getting pickier about what it keeps in the index.
Thad Kahlow:
Re: great content = great rankings.
I agree, and don’t think many could disagree, that creating great content, upon itself will deliver great rankings. But when we look at this issue from a much broader context (30k ft), Google’s mission is to provide the most relevant experience (not just SERPs). Better content provides a better experience.
So I digress because I believe this topic addresses a systemic ailment within search (may piss off a few ole school’s with this one)… but we as SEOs spend significantly too much time obsessing (me included) over algorithmic loop holes, updates, dances, undulations…to the point of reaching diminished returns. And I humbly (as much as I can be) suggest that if we as SEOs spent more time with our clients focusing on the end users needs when launching a search campaign and built unique, relevant content, and less focus on the extreme nuisances on the algo (yes, you need an extremely sound SEO best practices foundation +some)… Google, the client and most importantly the end users are better served = Search Industry wins. Otherwise, we are all fighting the battle of “out- optimizing” the other and not on the ultimate mission- winning the “relevant experience” war.
In sum- a significant focus on creating creative relevant content should be a major focus of every search solution, yet far few do.
Gord Hotchkiss:
Couldn’t agree more with Thad (surprise, surprise)...
And I would go even further. Search is rapidly growing beyond relevance as a metric of success to usefulness. Relevance is, and always has been, simply a measurable proxy for usefulness. Expect Google algos to start finding signals of usefulness, across multiple content buckets, and using that to determine what gets shown when, and to whom.
So, more and more, SEO and prospect intent have to align and chasing algos becomes moot. I think we have to worry much less about systematic testing against a black box algo and worry more about understanding what our prospects want to do. That’s where the search engines have to head.
Eric Enge:
Thad - great restatement of what I was saying.
We all need to remember where Google (and Bing) are going. They want high quality content. Over time, they WILL get it. Winning the "relevant experience" war will help you build great traffic now, and secure your business from the inherent risks of changes in Google's algorithm (because those changes will likely be a positive for you)
Rand Fishkin:
I'm going to, oddly enough, say that I disagree with a few of these statements.
Much as I would love to believe the engines will eventually reverse into signals that push higher quality content above more popular content, I don't think that will ever be the case.
Every other field is the same - it's not the fantastic, artistic, often foreign-language, personally compelling films that win Oscars or sell big at the box office. It's not the authentic, possibly awkward, but highly dedicated, humble and talented politicians who win elections. It's not the news with the most substance, science and accuracy that earns the front page headlines. In every facet of human life - it's what's popular and what's marketed.
I believe that as SEOs, we owe it to our clients to let them know that accessibility and quality are certainly bases they need to hit, but they won't necessarily win the battles or the war, even in the long term.
As Google/Bing/etc turn to new signals, they're looking at things like personalization, social search, Twitter data, usage data, etc. - these aren't things that "can't be gamed" or that predict "quality content" - they're just like data points society uses to value films, politicians and news stories. That's why my belief is that SEO isn't about "great" content or "the most useful" content. It's about the "most marketable" content targeted to demographics that are likely to fulfill the search engines' signals. Today, that's those on the web who create links. Tomorrow it could be those who tweet and share on Facebook. In years to come, it might be a wider swath of web users, but they will still be influence-able the way humans always are - through psychologies that persuade them to take action in the kinds of ways the engines measure.
I'll ask a final question - does anyone here believe that the highest converting landing page is the one that does the best job explaining the product or the one that taps into the science of persuasion (social proof, ego, scarcity, etc.)?
At the 30K foot level, I think Google is about representing popularity and relevance on the web the same way it's done in real life. They're not trying to re-invent the way humans consider/judge/evaluate content.
The above is, of course, opinion.
Gord Hotchkiss:
I think you’re right Rand...increasing, Google will try to pick up sociological and “human” based signals, rather than arbitrary semantic calculations. If you think about PageRank, it’s really a network based signal based on what they had to work with at the time, hyperlinking structures. Today, we have social networks and I’m sure there are a few people at Google smart enough to determine emergent behaviors out of the complexity of that network structure – SocialRank.
The second piece of this is personalization..identifying context relevant tasked based intent, and matching the network wide signals to that. Again, difficult to optimize against this...no universally true baseline to test against!
So, with the absence of a consistent and testable environment, we have no option but to switch our focus to people instead. If that’s where Google is going (and I know Microsoft is heading in that direction), we have to be going there too....
Richard Zwicky:
I'd disagree that there are no universal baselines, nor is it the best quality content, nor the most content that drives this.
Actually, I think that in its own way, Google always has tried to pick up on sociological and human based signals. The reality is that in the past, the dimensions for input were quite flat, and that allowed us to consider things two-dimensionally: Very simply; the site, and other sites that linked in, with just a little outside input.
The data points being examined were finite, and relatively easy to manipulate. As the networks have grown, and the ability and manners in which people have interacted has changed, so have a lot of the notions. Social networks are a dimension which doesn't necessarily connect directly to any one site at any time, but the activity therein sends very definite market signals about complex behaviour patterns globally which can be used to alter the algorithmic concepts of relevance.
I'd disagree that there are no baselines to test against, or optimize against. It's just the field of perspective to provide the analysis is different. Trends, baselines and norms are hard to determine on the individual, or even among small groups, but norms can be established over time, contextual variances defined, and then norms applied to other new or unique segments.
I would argue that the change in signal measurement is analogous to the change in communities that's occurred in the last 200 years. (in North America) As you move through these periods, signals, outreach, measurement all change, as did the tools of marketing. Here's a very short synopsis, to give you an idea of my perspective....
200 years ago, most people were born, raised, and died within 25 miles of the same place. Very few people ventured out, went away to school, etc... This was your community. You were raised with, worked with, and socialized with the same group of people. Their interests were your interests. Any wonder there was a caste / class system?
~150 years ago, rail networks were established, and movement increased. People traveled, but not too distantly, and usually only to hubs. Your community expanded a little, but not much. But you were exposed to more and more.
~100 years ago the automobile age started. People now traveled through a larger area, their regular range of movement grew to a ~100 mile radius. Now, you often were working with people you'd not encountered while growing up, your children were traveling further and further away to school, and your community was different based on interests.
~1945 - The modern automobile age began. Now working 2 hours away from home was "normal" (funny how the Internet's changing that part back!). Your home community was distinct from work. Husband and wife each had different communities and interactions during the day. Signals became much noisier. Marketing had to become more sophisticated. Messaging bounced around more.
~194X - Telephones in every home became common (not that long ago!) - first "Buzz marketing" ?? Still individual to individual...
~1960 - Televisions in every home became common... mass visual communication, and marketing.
~197X - The IT age starts, you know how this goes....
Communities? Nothing like they even were when I was growing up.
Today, like most of yours, mine is global, not local. It's based on a huge range of interests, and people I've encountered globally through my life. I don't have a single community I participate in regularly, I have many. I fade in and out from time to time as interest grows and fades. The buzz in one community is generally on different topics from one to another, and yet there are consistent common threads through all of them, no matter how disconnected.
Marketing, measuring, and responding the way a search engine needs to? It needs to monitor all the signals, across all communities, and understand how contextual relevance shifts. In essence, if I use the above analogy, the signals the engines used to monitor would be akin to where we were in community evolution somewhere between 100 years ago and 1945. The dimensions to be measured, and factored in are so far beyond how most traditional marketers think is unfathomable (which is this group's opportunity).
Chris Baggott:
This is an opinion I agree with. My only point from earlier has to do with popularity....compared to what? It's a lot easier to be "popular" in a smaller pond. :-)
Will Critchlow:
I'm a bit late to this party. A couple of late thoughts:
Firstly, I thought today's xkcd was appropriate:
Secondly, I think that a lot rests on how we define 'great content'. However we define it, I think Rand is correct that it cannot (except in rare cases) be sufficient - at a minimum it needs a strategy of repeated delivery that leads to enough of a following to bring the links it needs. I would like to bundle up a degree of 'linkability' into the definition of 'great content' though. Rand - I think your definition (where you compare it to great artwork, or honest politicians) is too narrow. I believe that 'great' in this context can be defined as the right combination of populist within the right niche, remarkable (in the Seth Godin sense of "likely to be remarked-upon") as well as the purer content metrics.
Finally, I was thinking about this in the context of the Mayday update, when it seems to me that we saw a change in the relative likelihood of content to succeed depending on where it appears. Best estimates show that we saw a move from long-tail rankings for content on large, powerful domains to rankings for smaller, more niche domains. Although this kind of relative change is nothing new, it is a timely reminder that content doesn't operate in a vacuum.
I think Will's actually done a remarkable job summing things up - it all depends what we mean by "great" content and how we think about the evaluation of that word by all the signals the engines measure today and might measure tomorrow.
Hopefully, this debate has been valuable to you - we felt, after looking back through the thread, that there was a lot of great stuff that deserved wider review and more thought. We'd all love to hear what you've got to say/share on the subject.
Fun to see the experts disagree, as they should. If I may throw in my humble couple of cents, there's a simpler way of looking at it. The problem with "content is king" and "great content = rankings" is that these are clichés. A cliché can be similar to a fact in that it can also have a high correlation with the truth, but there's also a profound difference. Consider the statement "quality backlinks = rankings." Now, that's a fact (minus special cases such as being banned from the index, where backlinks won't help anymore). It's a fact because backlinks are indeed a Google ranking factor. The quality of content is not in and of itself a ranking factor. I agree with what's said in your debate about the longtail keywords (but the whole point about them is that they are not as competitive.) But saying generally that "great content equals rankings" presupposes a whole lot of causality: people love great content and will want to link to it and those links will drive the rankings. Maybe.
As I suggested in SEOchat yesterday on this very subject, there are different kinds of content which have very different dynamics both inherently and when it comes to Web and SEO concerns. What is great content? Too often, it's a question of what's in what body part of the beholder. Compare the arts with scientific or technical documentation (I am a writer in my other life, please bear with me). When it comes to literature (what is great literature if not great content?), many if not the majority of readers don't know greatness from the crack of their arse. Not so in mathematics, by contrast, everything stands or falls on a proof, there can be no BS and sincerity is ignored. One consequence of this is in many cases people will link to the crappier content. It depends on the domain.
I would say that needed content leads to rankings. Identify information needs and fill them: now that really works. If there is no need, there's a lot of great content out there in fierce competition with itself for out attentions. It is hailing the night but we drive on, we don't stop. Life is too short for great content.
Thank you for a wonderful discussion!
Very cogent comment Phillip, and the only thing I disagree with is the statement I am a writer in my other life.
Your comment clearly shows that you sir, are a writer in every life. Very well worded.
Ponding out loud about your comment... it would be nice to do a reverse engineering study about how the worst websites rank due to the inlinks they own because they are so bad.
Very well said Philip. You made me think a moment, with that statement showing the difference, "quality backlinks=rankings?" I agree with you there. Though the backlinks are considered to be the ranking factors by Google, a quality content is always neccesary, to attract visitors/readers. That will help obtain a greater ranking in the long run.
Great Personal benefits = Great Rankings
I think great contents have more to do with providing personal benefits to its linkers than quality or any amount of marketing. Moreover quality lies in the eye of the beholder. For some a blog post may be aweome and for some others it may be a total crap.
"What is in it for me. Why i should link out to you". These are the questions a linker ask to himself and you must be able to provide a convincing answer to get links. Great contents are the one which provide great benefits to its linkers esp. when they are linked out.
Few examples:
"Here i give you $500 to link out to me. Wow. Thanks buddy. Here is your link". Now what quality or marketing of contents have to do here? Nothing.
Another example.
"You link out to me and i will give you 10% discount on all of my products. Another 5% discount if you refer me to other suppliers".
Another example.
Leveraging partnership opportunites, public relations and personal relations to get back links. Here also quality of contents has little or no role to play.
Yet another and stronger example is of twitter. Why every third website on earth is linking out to twitter. Is it because twitter guys are doing aggressive marketing worldwide? Is it becuase twitter is providing great contents like the ability to send 140 characters message to some one? No. It is becuase twitter is providing great personal benefits to its linkers by giving them the ability to market themselves and their business and the only way to leverage this benefit is by linking out to twitter. Good contents often end up being bookmarked or tweeted, great contents often end up being linked out.
I absolutely agree with your point here himanshu. Nice examples quoted. Finally, we have to agree that every marketers are focussed only on the personal benefits as linkers and that twitter example very clearly shows that.
Glad I found this post. I am writing an article about "great Content" at the moment, targeted at site owners who hear everyone saying it is important but no one defining what it is! (Matt Cutts seems to have "great content" tourettes!)
Great content is the visible bit of the iceberg. The tools and techniques of distribution are invisible but critical. Great content engages to the extent that it energises the viewer. It influences and encourages.
Therefore the process of generating great content starts with your strategy and does not end until you have measured and understood the reaction of the recipients.
necessary but not sufficient. do we need to keep beating this horse?
In determining any signal to use as a ranking factor, the first thing Google (or any search engine) must determine is if there is a reliable signal to measure in the first place.
Measuring the "quality" of content is nearly impossible. In some verticals, the highest quality content is 1 line of text (ie: "what is the definition of quality"). In other verticals, the highest quality content is a single picture (ie: "picasso don quixote"). In some verticals, it is videos, in others it is long lists.
The thought that "Quality" content is an easily or practically measured signal is fallacious. Just take a moment and try to think out how you would algorithmically determine if a piece of content is of Quality. Then, for each one of those measurements, realize that by me merely copying and pasting your "Quality" piece of content and making slight textual changes, I could destroy the value of that signal with innumerable copies of nearly identical quality measures.
The reality is that the best measure of Quality happens to also be the best measure of Popularity - PageRank. Google long ago crowd-sourced the Quality algorithm by using human-created inbound links as a way to determine whether content on a page is Quality. There is no better signal that the content on a page is Quality than the number and quality of links pointing to it.
The Link is King. Long Live the Link.
I'm just honoured to be in such exalted company. Thanks for allowing this to come off-list into the wider world, guys.
Not sure why this deserved a thumbs down unless you & your brother both sneak onto each other's comments to give yourself an "I love you, man" style thumbs down.
Great and popular content = Great Rankings in the longer term
All of you have valid points. "Great Content" is too simple a term, but if it's built specifically and mostly for the end user (and marketed correctly), you're sure to have Great Rankings for the longer term.
I have many sites that we've built purely for the end-user (with some factors at the expense of making Google happiest.) They are increasingly successful and have seen no decrease since the may update. We enjoy a lot of longtail search and have seen no significant lose in traffic. We build for the end user which incorporates the best content with the most popular way of displaying it (written and visually.)
Rand is right that popular content is always going to win over most everything else. I have faith that the masses appreciate the great content over crappy in almost every case (within each niche.) Though when it comes to a niche vs. niche basis, the idiots will win.
Here is another piece of the thread that I added near the end of the discussion:
I stand by my original position. Great content can, should, and will rule the day. However, we need to work on our definition a bit here. If someone is looking for the latest gossip on a movie personality, you may expect one type of content. If someone wants to know what's the hottest video game, you expect something else. For these types of questions, you can define great content based on the opinion of the mob, and this is to some degree appropriate (more on that in a minute). However, someone who has learned their spouse has Huntington's disease is going to be looking for a completely different type of information. The opinion of the mob is not going to help them at all.
For another example, if you are looking for a great stereo setup for your house, and you are a serious audiophile, the opinion of the mob is not going to satisfy you. You know the limitations of where you want to put the stereo, and likely have many opinions about what is important to you. You have probably invested the time to be a bit of an expert, and the only opinions you are going to be interested in are those of other experts.
Or, if you are a university professor working on a research paper (or even a graduate student working on a research paper), again you are going to be looking for expert opinions. These are just a few examples, and far more examples are easily constructed.
I know in many ways our society is in danger of becoming really superficial in many ways. USA Today like presentations of information may appear to rule the day. But, I believe that there is still a lot of need for really good information. Once your passion for something starts to emerge, you want more. Once you have a real need, again you want more.
Popularity contests, or the opinion of the mob is in fact, great content for the right types of questions. For other types of questions, it is not nearly good enough.
Finally, I'd also suggest that we should not be assuming that signals from Twitter and Facebook are suddenly going to become huge ranking factors. Specific demographics of people use these types of sites, and signals available to search engines remain really noisy. I think it will happen over time, and the search engines are beginning to make use of these things now, but widespread usage will not happen as quickly as many are inclined to think.
Google adds my Facebook contacts to my search results.
If it already understands that I have contacts on Facebook who communicate on the search term im using, thats a pretty strong signal to them to show me "socialised" results. Just another facet of personalisation.
Some of the signals are not noisy, they are very clear. I think social factors will be a huge ranking factor, but only in specific searches personalised to me.
In the experts cases ,both audio and research, those searchers would start on Google but move to more specifc expert search sites.
Google may itself start to become the "jumping off" point to more specific search engines (like google scholar)
Dear Eric,
you're right making this distinction between "Mob" and "In Deep" kind of information.
But, as I was trying to say in my comment above, this is really like what people wants to watch on tv and how - therefore - the tv scheduling is planned and delivered to the public.
It is obvious that for the meanstreams topics, the "Mob relevance", therefore Popular vs. Technical/In deep content, will win the 'battle', and that for insight, deeper, more focused topics (which can also be the same of the mainstreams in many cases but from a diffeent perspective, as you say here) the "Great content" will win the battle against superficial or "USA Today style" one.
That is why is really important to plan and focus perfectly our own public when it comes to create a web or optimize it for a web marketing campaign (and there came my talk about thematic channels).
What is to be cleared is how Search Engines are going to use in their algo the "psicology" and behaviour of their Users in order to present the most relevant results. That's why I believe that personalization is going to be more and more important. And that's why I think that SERPs are going to definitely vertically assemble any possible kind of result though inbox and rich snippets.
How social buzz will affect the SERPs? I suppose - as said by Firegolem - that it will be going with a better personalization of the SERPs, as it is supposed that a searcher has mostly tastes and interests in common with his friends and "circles of known people" (I said "mostly" because it could be easily state the opposite).
What kills me is going to SMX advanced and hearing speakers say the key to SEO is to produce 'great content'. Its a slap in the face of all the attendees who pay to hear great tips and actionability. At the round table last year everyone was all about 'build great content and the rankings will happen'. I almost threw my laptop at the wall in outrage. I think at this point it should be assumed that everyone is making at least 'good' content and most of it is 'great'.
If great content is in the eye of the beholder, I see three beholders here: site designers and the products and services they represent, the search engines, and end customers, two human roles and one machine role. So what might "great" content be?
(quoting Will) Linkable, relevant (populism), and remarkable:
Twitter is an excellent example. If I only ever tweet sale prices on my products, people who might buy my products *and* follow me on Twitter will probably notice and they might even respond. They could retweet my ad, but maybe not.
If I was mining Twitter I wouldn't pay any attention at all to tweets, but I would pay a lot of attention to retweets, and especially retweets (relevant and popular ideas contained in links) with many hops. More rewteets per idea means that the idea is more important.
Could great content then be relevant, popular ideas packaged to be easily linkable for humans and semantically clear for machines?
Maybe great content is really OMG cat packaged in an SEO-engineered campaign.
Great thoughts. Our strategy has always been, be the best at your niche. Build great content, link build the snot out of it and then cross your fingers.
The important question is not "If you build it, will they come?" but rather, "If you build it, will they bounce?" or "If you build it, will they stay (and buy)?" Any web page without satisfying content is spam or junk, and any SEO who tries to get it to rank highly is a spammer or a junk dealer. That said, Rand has a point about winning Oscars and winning elections - the best may not win, but the one who is perceived as the best does win.
Great debate, thank you. My 2 cents regarding Content Creation:
Find and give your target audience the kind of content they are looking for, this will lead to the opportunity of increasing the number of links to your site and therefore increasing rankings and traffic.So as Chris Baggot mentioned: "Deliver the right message for the right person at the right time", this is what defines great content. "Great content is determined by the consumer of that content."It is all about creating content that adds value to your target audience.
I agree that the great content has to be there. However, more importantly, it's all about the "packaging" of that content. Keep in mind that I believe that most readers don't sit down and actually read the full articles and all of the content before passing it on (sharing it).
If the content on your site is packaged well (and is on a trusted domain), then people will share it with others and it will eventually rank well.
Most content does have a chance to rank well, but it just needs to be packaged well in order to get more human attention--that will lead to better rankings.
What I believe is that a content - being or not Great Content - can be a success in popularity and therefore in link & sharing if it's very good in this: ENGAGE
One of your comments hedges into the broader idea:
Does Great Product = Great Success?
No, not always. I'm sure we can find many examples of amazing products that no one has ever heard of. On the other hand, I don't think marketing and popularity alone are enough either. Would the iPhone sell like it does just because of Apple fan-boys and Steve Jobs giving flowering speeches? No - it's a great product AND it's well marketed. Sure, Steve could sell crap better than I could, but his success would still be limited.
I have this same argument with the idea of "passion" being the key to success. I'm sure I could find 1,000 people who are sincerely passionate about what they do and have fallen flat on their faces or languished in obscurity. Does that mean we shouldn't be passionate about what we do? Of course not - it's very important. That doesn't mean it's enough, though.
Good "philosophical" comment dear Dr.Pete.
And easy to confirm using DIGG as example. There are many websites that had their moment of glory and overwhelming boost of traffic because of one post/article that made them famous for 15 minutes... and then returned to their normal anonimity.
As the tail gets longer and personalization grows, it becomes mandatory that organizations (our clients) dig into each subsegment of their audience? The right content for the right search.Email Marketing followed is similar path right? It started with lists and we talked about the best day to send our "newsletter" It has evolved to data-driven relevant content (for many) the right message for the right person at the right time.If I'm a pharmaceutical company I want to target the right content for Doctors, that would be different perhaps than for nurses, that will be different from a patient researching a specific drug that will be different from a person who is searching on a specific disease state. Heck, think diabetes: I want content for a 14 year old, different content for their parents and different content for the 70 year old who was just diagnosed.Great content is determined by the consumer of that content. Those consumers are becoming more and more segmented and being trained to expect (as they should) specifically relevant content.
Here’s a point for discussion -
If having great content is critical to success then to what extent are you an SEO and to what extent are you a publisher? Should we all start offering editorial services alongside SEO?
seo is dead. we are all business optimisers.
so yes, you need to have a handle on publishing too.
Better saying... SEO has transformed and enlarged.
I hear debates about great content since I was a young head of programming in a thematic channel... and I suppose that is a topic that will be discused foevr and ever.
With the premise that all of you have your part of reason, I want to remark the distinction Rand did between Great Content and Popular Content. The examples he did are perfect, and rely on a fundamental factor: people.
Using television programming as a metaphore, we cannot but agree that is not Great Content what determines the success. On the contrary channels as PBS should be the most viewed. What we see is that the Nielsen audience datas say that tv shows as American Idol or Dancing with the Stars (that we cannot take - also technically - as great content representatives) are ones of the most viewed. Why? Because people likes them. And because people likes them tv stations produce and schedule those kind of show... so creating a vicious loop (people likes > tv schedules > people likes) that put in an angle what could be considered great content, which can possibly win all the critics awards, but not the popularity contests.
On the other hand we also can see exceptions to this (and what ones!), where grat content means great popularity: the HBO tv series case could be taken as an example.
How can we translate all of this in the web panorama? That popular is what fill a people need... and usually the need is quite basic (pleasure, distraction, entertainment, basic information). Therefore will win the contest the website that will offer the most entertaining easy way to offer content and not the the one that offer the most complete and quality content. With a graphic example, is going to be more popular a web page with the video of a cute kittie playing funnily with a baby than a brainy post about how is good that babies spend their time with puppies.
But... what if you are treating a topic that is not so funny or not so easy to present?
The first answer could be: go straight forward to your niche. As thematic tv channel are looking at a very well focused target (hunters, motors' lovers, National Geographic kind of people, Ecologists, Women-around-40s-and-50s-with-a-lot-of-free-time-as-their-kids-now-go-to-college...) so you would have to do with your website. And to gain the popularity contests inside the thematic web-channel competition, you'd need try to engage the "extreme" sides of costumer/user of your website, not the average, as are the first who will possibly help you with the Buzz (remembering a great lesson by Seth Godin here)
The second answer, that is the one I prefer, is that's any topic can be delivered in a easy and enterteining way. You can have a website about the secrets of the nano particles and black holes and have a big audience if you are able to do what - for instance - Carl Sagan did in the late '70s Cosmos series. I know this is the hardest answer, but that is why I like it the most.
Wow! As a newbie I want to hear more of this type of debate. It brings out the nuances of the subject. I have always thought that content is king and that was that. But the arguments are so solid both ways that I can see that it is not necessarily so. You do need good content if you are going to build a following and get links. On the other hand if the site is not well built and rejects the spiders then it will never be found. I would be like casting pearls before swine, a waste of your time.
I have seen quite a few sites with content of dubious quality ranking on the first page, so clearly, awful content ≠ bad ranking.
Great content is the king in the world of SEO and SEM, this is the reason why it become one of the very important component for the site's ranking and massive traffic.
I have to say, I really like the intent of this post, and applaud Rand for tackling it, but this just completely misses the mark. It's like there is half a post here, but its useless because its missing its other half
I think it's impossible to adequately address this issue without at least definining what "great content' and "great rankings" are, and what their context is.
Otherwise, you're just debating a bunch of vague terms that don't mean anything.
"Great content" is subjective. The search engines are trying to select what it thinks the searcher will find great. That in itself is a difficult process. I may be able to recommend a good website to a close friend that I believe would provide "great content" for him/her. I couldn't necessarily do that for a random stranger. The search engines are trying to match strangers (less so with personalized search results) with great content.
The search engines need signals to help them ID great content. Keywords only provide so much help, the engines need human signals to better choose relevant results. Even if there were no black hats the engines would still need human signaling to provide the best content for each individual searcher.
I don't think great content on its own will lead to rankings. How about saying great DISCOVERED content can lead to high rankings?
Great content is not equal to everyone. I agree content is King, but it depends on user behaviours in order to check what is good content or not, and we may have different opinions. Anyway, content is the Lion of SEO
Hi Rand,
I would definitely say, this is one among the best posts in seomoz. Loved the debate and also the follow-up comments.
SEO is not only about a great content. It is a mixture of content and backlinks and that only results in the rankings. But only a great content can impress lots of visitors and in-turn will urge them to link back to the content, which is again a great way to rank in a longer term.
Thumbs up for that effort of putting them all together. :)
Hi guys,
this is my first comment on Seomoz..and Im glad to share ideas in this community..:)
All of your posts are truly interesting. I think that the most value one, like anything in life, is in the middle..great content allows you to earn great ranking but you have to create great "markatable" content as well..in Italy we have a saying: "no beautiful woman is such without a nice dress"..
Anyway, we can't forget what Google said talking about Serving end users (Registration Statement. Security and Exchange Commission Washington DC on April 29, 2004) "Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority”.
So, great content will always have value in the organic..the web is made by people searching something interesting and all of us looking for most valuable contents that give us answers at what we ask in the best way.
Good to see some fresh perspectives on this issue. I actually wrote a post disagreeing with Rand's content comments in his myth versus reality post. My post: 'Rand is wrong: Content quality is all-important'.
It just doesn’t make sense to chase your tail trying to trick Google into thinking you’ve given it what it wants. Why not actually give it what it wants? Quality. Google is on a never-ending quest to return quality search results. It’s already quite hard to trick it into thinking you have quality content when you don’t. Why continue down that road when it’s only going to become rockier? Google will get better at weeding out the poor quality, and you’ll spend more and more trying to game the system.
Just my 2 cents.
Interesting topic
I totally agree with Rand on this - human beings are far more swayed by style and headlines than substance pretty much across the whole spectrum.
However I think we need to consider the definition of "great content". As far as I am concerned from an seo perspective "great content" simply means having the keywords in the right places.
Of course when it comes to the ultimate goal of an seo (making mountains of cash) then "great content" in the traditional sense , i.e. content that someone actually wants to read, will undoutedly lead to higher conversions.
I don't understand why people looking at SEO and other parts of SEM as separate issues which has nothing to do with each other.
IMHO whole discussion is quite silly. What is the goal of doing any internet marketing? Make/convince people to do what we want them to do. Buy a product, donate money, give us contact detail, read and spread our ideas.
All parts of internet marketing must work or our efforts won't succeed. So without good content people won't buy, without SEO people won't come, without good usability people won't find anything etc.
It is like suggesting to have best seats in our new Boeing airplane but don't worry about buying engines ...
SEO, copywriting (content), usability, design should be only tools to achieve the goals not goals itself.
My first comment woohoo ... hopefully it makes a little bit of sense.
Note: One last thought? What is great content? Content which people like to read, share and make them buy ...
I am really thankful to you for giving this list of all writer in different place to find everyone is difficult. I read many writer but my favourite writer is randfish. His every post give some unique knowledge. So again thanks, Keep it up randfish.
I can't believe this thread is this long over something so simple. Great content isn't the end all be all, BUT think about this for a second.
You rank for the greatest keyword ever and Google is sending tons of traffic your way. If you don't have markable and great content then you still fail because those visitors will just bounce. Over time Google will see this and downgrade your ranking. So no matter what yes you must have great content because without it you fail.
Has anyone else noticed this? It seems SEOmoz main blog feedburner count has gone from 60K to 27K overnight? Is there an error?
It says 65K now, maybe it was a system fluke on Google's Feedburner end?
Its one of the spokes in the wheel of SEO that make for high rankings. There seems to be NO MAGIC BULLET! Its a combination of things, good content (that can be subjective), popular or marketable content, and then the other things like link building etc...It seems that the theme recently is to start getting real aggressive with 3 and 4 word phrases for clients. Great post!
Tony ;~)
I cannot but agree that this is one of the best post I've read on SEOmoz... and, if I may suggest one thing, I think that can be the prototype of a sub-genre blog post: the meeting one (or Symposium one, if we want give it classical name).
It's better that a simple Twitter conversation, because it can give the opportunity to go deeper into thoughts and topics, and it's something that all the people (I include myself in the category) who cannot attend to all the conferences are always looking for.
The fun is that when you were talking about "great content" you had come out with a huge piece of Great Content!
I see it as a panelist discussion... and the candy over the tart would be that the comments would be treated as a Q&A moment, giving the opportunity to all the panelist the opportunity to answer to the comments.
Giving to this kind of post a canonical structure will make of it the post we were missing in the SEO & Web Marketing panorama and make of the SEOmoz one even better than it is.
Later I will write down my considerations about the topic.
Ciao
And yet another reason why I wish I had taken at least one Human Psychology class in college. :-)
Thanks Rand for putting this together, and thank you gentlemen for being willing to sit under the microscope.
It is all about definitions and especially in a society that seemingly is spurning consistant definitions for just about anything its nice to see smart people realize that words and their definitions are imporant. :-)
MattPresidentOne Take Media
Easily one of the best SEOmoz posts I've read in a long time. It also makes me want to work on upping my street cred so I can sit in on some of these types of conversations.
In the perfect world, Geat content=Great Rankings..
But we are not live in a perfect world.
Whoa Randman! This is the kinda post that I can eat right up. I just checked in the moz in the off chance that there'd be a new posting and this is what greeted me!
Sharing the conversations of this private list could totally make a great series. I move that this is the first of the series to come.
tks for rand again , u always bring pleasently surprised to us.
I'm coming to this article a little late so I haven't read any of the other comments but I'm assuming that there are a lot of posts that think the same as me.
The term 'content' is hard, does it mean text or can it mean anything? For example, a site built entirely in flash can rank well because it's got great content (linkbait) or a site with not-so-good content but with just the right keywords and fewer links could easily rank equal to the the flash site. What I'm getting at here, is that there are two ways to look at this:
- ranking well because content is good & will get lots of links; or
- ranking well because there is content (whether this is longtail or not).
In my opinion, for a site to rank well and maintain it's position then it needs good content. My reasoning behind this is that people may link to your site at first, but to keep people interested, to keep them linking and to attract new links you're going to need content that is not only interesting, but of good quality (ie, good quality/great content).
Thank you for the "behind the curtain" look at the debate you head with the other leading experts in the industry!!
what is "great content"?Einstein's theory of relativity?shannon information theory? what is high ranking?en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory? oh!
Great thought provoking theories:
Content regardless of the quality, will not stand the challenge when it comes to targeting highly competitive keywords terms. I do believe that good, unique content plays an important role in website development and SEO, but without the supporting networks of “votes or recommendations” (Links), the website will become just one of many great sites that not many people will ever get to see. I think that the UGC provided by social media sites, will play an important factor as regards what we see within the organic SERPs over time.
Great content on an unmarketed domain will be unread.
Great pictures on an unmarketed domain will remain unseen.
Great music on an unmarketed domain will remain unheard.
Have to agree with Rand on this one.
Crap music on a marketed domain will be heard - just look at Soulja Boy on YouTube (lol).
I hate to be a cynic, but I have to agree with Rand on this one.
My niche is nature pictures. I like to think my pics are not too bad, but I'll tell you this: I outrank thousands upon thousands of photographers whose artistic skill far surpasses mine.
"People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."
However, there's another way of thinking of this, which comes out of evolutionary biology. The phrase "survival of the fittest" is either tautological or meaningless. If it has any meaning, it is simply "survival of that which survives." Fitness can only be defined as the ability to survive -- any other definition ultimately fails.
Maybe the problem is that we think we know what great content is. Maybe great content should be defined as content that ranks, gets traffic, and converts. Any other definition presumes that you know better than the system itself what ought to succeed. That's pure hubris. What survives is what survives.
It seems to me that this is turning into an argument about semantics.
What everyone seems to agree on, is that content allows you to rank. How good that content is, determines how well people like your content, in turn gaining more links, clicks, whatever.
What the content will NOT do, is guarantee ranking. It on its own will not make you rank better.
What if the argument was Great Content LEADS to Ranking well? All of a sudden, the argument changes and I doubt anyone will disagree now.
Wow, guys. This exchange was simply fascinating and goes well beyond anything I've read that tries to define "great content" and why it's important. I do think it poses a challenge for SEO's as the industry moves forward. Content creation might just become as important as tweaking said content to appease the algos.
nice read... but I don't even see the debate around great content because that's what makes a great website. It's all about content and adding value to customers.
Some sites might rely on 90%+ new visits to keep their profit margins up but I think in todays market it's more about getting customers to return to your site... and that can only be done through great content and features.
If you have great content and a great viral marketing campaign then SEO is less and less useful.
I agree with you about the topic, but not about the conclusion. For me, exactly because of content SEO is going to be even more important... as I believe that SEO is not anymore something about plain on page optimization and old classic link building. SEO now - IMO - is general discipline that is going to include more specific ones (viral marketing being one of them)
The SEO gods have spoken. I would ritually sacrifice a laptop for you guys to do this again. Great post, I always verify my information across multiple sources and here you go and do it for me. For shame, I was hoping to spend more time reasearching this topic :) . Seriously though, thanks guys.
The way I think about great content is that it must be created with a dual purpose in mind. Content for the search engines is one thing and content for users is another, forging them together can be powerful if done correctly. Considering how traditional media journalists are being downsized left and right, maybe they could find a home at an SEO firm?? :) It seems it is important now more than ever to write engaging, unique content which can be difficult if you have a dry topic. Good writers can't get water from a rock but they can make it rain!