Content has always been regarded as the “king” but thanks to the indisputable importance of back links, it always gets the treatment of a lowly official. For quite some time, it were back links that get all the protocol, whilst the content remains a king that people acknowledge quite half-heartedly.
Back links were the establishment that moved things around, webmaster’s emphasis on quality content was more like a figment, they thought that they are putting good content on their websites, in reality there was little substance, and more noise.
The content added more fat to the Internet than muscles; understandably the web was getting more and more plump, thanks to all that spam.
Panda comes in:
I am not sure about the improvement in search results, but Google Panda update has been successful in shifting the paradigm, and chances are that we will finally be having an influx of good quality content in near future, or at least less spam.
So, what makes some “content” superior in quality?
According to the grapevine, Google Panda has also thwacked some websites that were providing the kind of content that fits the definition of quality, in more than one way. What we need to remember is that, at the end of the day, Google ranking algorithm is an algorithm, and it can deem a content to be of quality only if it’s getting the quality signals.
So, it is quite possible that, even though, those were quality websites, but they’d have failed to accumulate quality signals, whilst some low quality ones are topping the ranks, because they managed to arrange for the right signals. Bottom-line?
Apart from creating and publishing quality content, you should make sure that your Blog is giving the right signals to the search engines.
Does the originality warrant the quality?
Something that is synonymous to the quality is the originality, but is the originality good enough to make some content quality? And is the unoriginal content totally useless?
The fact is, all that hoopla about unique content has made people assume that some text that passes a trivial plagiarism test is unique, hence quality, while some content that directly borrows ideas from other content is not unique, hence low on the quality meter.
Both of these notions are quite off the mark. A news story or article that doesn’t take a totally new route, but bring together relevant information from the net and presents a comprehensive take on a certain topic (and then links to the main source) is still valuable.
On the other hand, an article that comes up with a totally unique idea but with little substance is still ordinary. The content should provide some value to its users to be considered quality content, and the more value the better.
How do you know if your content is quality?
Ask the readers, because looking towards some SEO expert for the definition of quality is a waste of time, the ultimate nod of approval that you can get will come from the readers. If the readers like your content, there is nothing that can stop your Blog from prevailing.
What are your thoughts on the recent Google Panda Update ?
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