On-Page Optimization - Industry Has Lost It

[Future State]

Your argument can be summarized as follows:

"None of it works, it's all bullshit, you don't understand it, everyone interprets it wrong, all the definitions are wrong. Gurus are bullshit, I alone hold the keys, but I won't tell you the answer, not here anyways."

It's easy to take a stance of negation and call everything bullshit and tell everyone they're wrong and nobody can really divine the mystic truth but you. The problem is that you don't have a positive replacement for the things you negate. As a matter of fact, you don't really have any value to add to the discussion at all.

It's like a magician raising the curtain and declaring the rabbit has disappeared when the crowd can see the rabbit sitting there still. Then you try to convince them that it's not a rabbit, it's actually a cat, and therefore they're all wrong and can't trust their eyes, and they really don't understand what a cat is anyways.

Most of us have been around the block and been in the game longer than many of you have owned a computer. I've seen this game so many times. "I hate gurus, you can trust me, I'm not a guru." Hell, that @jayk kid just went psycho pulling the exact same stunt last week. I guarantee everyone else, that while you tell us you're not a guru, that you're either writing an e-book or course, or have already attempted to sell an e-book or course in the past, or have a guru website, or all three.

 

[Rob Lowem]

I found out very quickly about the word count factor when google decided that a 200 word post updating my blog visitors of a companys' new owner was to rank in place of the previously ranked 2500 word review (that took me a whole day) I did about the company.

Fair enough, the shorter content was laser focused on the keyword and topic but it sure pissed me off.

In another case, I made a quick place holder post saying to check back for a product review. When I finally got to making the 2000+ word review on my other site, that short place holder post stuck behind the review page on the serps for months. 2k words was 3rd, 100 word page was 4th etc.

It is part of my strategy to blast out template based place holder pages for different reviews to get hold of rankings even before the full review is made. I've been doing this for over 6 years with no problems.

HOWEVER... it's undeniable the sheer amount of keywords you can rank for with a 2k word article. Just the sheer amount of keywords/phrases contained in it and their relative semantic/similar terms google ranks you for is amazing.

Another benefit to it is that in your webmaster console, you'll end up with a lot of keywords where you rank in the top 100 for with their impressions. This is gold for finding high traffic keywords you would never have dreamt of. With this I found out that while I was targeting "service+review" type terms, there was 10 times the impression for "is service safe?" and "how does service work?".

You just have to be flexible with this and rely on your own testing and experience. As long as you get to provide the answer and call to action to the visitor in the first 2 paragraphs you'll be ok with conversions.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Fair enough, the shorter content was laser focused on the keyword and topic but it sure pissed me off.

In some cases, depending on the terms you were going for, this was most likely more related to the intent of the query and not the length of content. If it at all had a news angle (like a short tail for the company brand name itself) then it makes sense the news article would rank better. It'll also stop ranking over time since it was time sensitive news.

One thing I notice is people get frustrated because they don't take the time to see what Google considers the intent of a query. If all Google ranks in the top 30 are ecommerce pages with 50 words of content and a listing of products, and then I write a blog post with 3,000 words of content, it doesn't matter how much better my post is. It will never rank because it's not even in the ballpark of what's being considered as fulfilling the intent of the query.

This happened to me a couple of years ago for a nice ~15k search term. I was told about the term and a product that sells well on it, went for it, got to the front page, and then Google changed the intent of the query. So now, instead of it being blog posts recommending software for it, it became links to the crappiest shareware nonsense. Fast forward 2 years and they flipped it back and now I rank again.

The most recent Newsstand article was all about this same concept and trying to understand how the intent and sentiment might change and taking advantage of it. It's worth a read.

In the same fashion, I've forgotten to check what kind of posts Google is ranking for a term. I smashed out 5,000 words and waited and waited. I finally noticed that they were ranking 200 word posts that included a definition for the term, instead of ones really going in depth and explaining what it was.

It's whatever they think will satisfy the users the best. Sometimes that's related to word count and sometimes it's not. But when it is related to word count, it's only related. It usually has to do with other classifiers like "definition" or "direct download," as mentioned above.

 

[RomesFall]

In some cases, depending on the terms you were going for, this was most likely more related to the intent of the query and not the length of content.

There's a load of interesting stuff about query interpretation in the recent file google released about web rater quality guidelines or whatever.

E.g. dominant interpretation - what most people mean when they search with a certain term.

This also has a lot of interesting effects on the way we should write and target our content.