Where are we going with all this content junk?

[Frog]

So something I have been thinking about for a long time and never really seen discussed anywhere is the trade off of what google says and what google does, what google tells us to do and what we should be doing (that has been discussed but I am about to get more specific).

I have some serious doubt about a few things I can "see coming". For example in the old old old days everyone used to push hard on exact and part match anchor text when linkbuilding and use that to get rankings, however, google came along and made changes so that people who did this had their sites hit so now we all use branded and naked URLs.

When google made changes to impact sites that had too much exact or partial match anchor text a lot of site tanked, however, as far as I know there wasnt much warning before this happened and quite a lot of sites were killed off either via a penalty or just because they didnt rank so well anymore even without an applied penalty (even though everyone always says “my site has a penalty” – no it doest it just doesn’t rank anymore).

So trying to bring things back to what I want to discuss:

Big authority content is a thing right now, everyone is talking about how you should have at least a few pieces of “money content” especially with affiliate sites, this content is usually long long long, I have seen talk of >4k+ words. People talk about going back and further developing old posts and adding content and not making new posts where that is an option.

I have a feeling I can see something coming here,

People no longer want big content, people want their questions answered quickly and after often using mobiles. When someone is using a mobile they probably don’t want to read 4.5k words. If you have a site about “payment card processors” you would, following current trends push out massive blog posts about payment processing, apple pay, mobile credit card readers etc and people would read it, on their desktops but the data shows people don’t do that on phones.

Note – I know big content works at the moment and that is where we need to focus to earn now but doesn’t it seem likely that a change could hit us that changes all this? There is a mobile first indexing thing going on but at the moment we are basically having to do as google says in order to rank. There is nothing new with having to do as google wants but at the moment it seems like what they want is really, more than ever, pushing against what everyone else wants – google want 4.5k words, I want to read a sentence and get the answer when I use my phone.

Does anyone think there is a huge change going to come along and hit us where we don’t need or should not have big content anymore as concise answers are preferred or is google going to continue to push people into making big sites no one wants to see in order to get traffic.

This page hxxp:// x x.theverge.c x om/2016/7/20/12234888/teal-drone-fastest-camera-quad-matus-thiel-fellow

Has over 1.2k words and shows up for the search term “fastest drone” but I don’t give a *** about anything on that page, I did the search and I just want to know that the fasted drone is the model xx and it can go at xx mph.

 

[Broland]

Since it seems you might not be a fan of long answers/responses, I'll keep this brief

A site/article that covers all aspects, related keywords, answers all questions about a topic will be better classified by G, get more clicks, traffic, shares, natural links etc. Also every SERP (search query) is a different situation - but the more of them a domain or page ranks for on a topic the better.

 

[Ryuzaki]

however, as far as I know there wasnt much warning before this happened

There was if you were analytical and experimenting versus just listening to the Forum & Blogosphere. Google already had an anchor-based over-optimization filter, although it was fairly high. It was only a matter of time before they lowered it. It was the obvious target when it was so easily exploitable. Just like the switch to branding could be seen by how easy exact-match-domains made things.

doesn’t it seem likely that a change could hit us that changes all this?

I think they have enough metrics in place to handle this. It's why they are splitting the mobile and non-mobile indexes. Then the SERP pogo-sticking helps sort the issue out.

One attempt I've seen is a TL;DR kind of section at the top with a jQuery "fog of war" type of mechanic where you have to "click to read the rest of the article". It keeps it simple for mobile and skimmers and still allows the deeper interest people to get their fix of information.

I'd want the best of both worlds because it'll be the links and social shares that still drive the rankings, assuming the on-page is fine. You'll only get the links and shares from people who care, and you'll need to provide depth and breadth for that, not a shallow summary.

 

[CCarter]

This is a great question. Here is what I see, Answer Box and Knowledge Graph are going to become more prominent for users that want a quick answer, and then they can click through to get more details. Google has continued to increase Answer Box and Knowledge Graphs within the SERPs and it's only going to get better with their increasing A.I. neural network technologies.

Two great write ups about the mechanics of it:

• Total SERP Domination Using the New Google Answer Box Technique
• Getting Into The Knowledge Graph - 101

As an website owner, yes the reality is that Google is going to continue to answering more questions themselves since that's what users want. I'm a user looking for an iPhone repair shop in Chicago, IL, I don't want a long list of reviews of the top 10, most likely I want the closest location since I'm on mobile. So I'll get a map output of locations with distances from me. That only benefits the local iPhone business, and no website doing "iPhone repair reviews in Chicago, IL".

The user experience is simply too overwhelming for Google to not service the former versus the yesteryears of the latter. If Google kept itself in 2001 mode, then realistically another competitor would be able to come in with a better user experience and kill off Google, so it has to keep moving with the crowd.

Now as website owners, we have to do everything we can to make sure we get into MAP, Answer Boxes for our major terms, and knowledge graph on a bigger scale if it applies.

You still have to create the in-depth content since the person simply looking for a quick answer on how fast a drone flies probably is just looking for facts. But there will be a percentage of users who want to know that because they want to purchase a drone - that's where the more in-depth content comes into play with comparison charts, in-depth explanations, images, videos, and interactive javascripts to create a better user experience that people are willing to write about, talk about, and share links to generating SEO as well as social/viral traffic. And within that content to generate money, you do the traditional display AD (CPC or CPM model), affiliate model, or sell the drones yourself.

 

[MichaelHayes]

+1 for knowledge graph and answer boxes. This is exactly what Google is using to solve the mobile problem of quick questions/etc.

If google doesn't have a knowledge graph answer box for it, Google/Siri will even read your brand name aloud to a person who asks a question and the answer box is your site, which is a nice little microimpression of your brand.

Agreed, it does seem like the content thing is overblown, the answer to every inquiry isn't 5,000 words, but, gotta go with the flow and use a table of contents to help answer multiple questions in one long form article, since long form articles are getting rewarded right now.

My real question is about the mobile first index, which is very weird for several reasons, firstly, how do they handle internal links? Do we need to hide navigation, footer links, sidebar links, ecom refine navigation, all those fuckin links, on a iPhone screen?

 

[Nat]

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I came across a search query where the user intent is very specific. It's also probably filled with mobile skimmers. They want to find a list and they don't want "explanations" of the list items, and they certainly don't want a long introduction. I think that writing an article with a long "SEO" friendly intro will probably increase bounce rate, and lots of added info under each list item will probably just be frustrating. Of course, what you're left with then is a thin article.

It's interesting to see that the results in the SERPs that provide what people actually want are the ones that get the most shares. Consequently, looks like they are getting the most natural backlinks. I'm assuming a crazy boring SEO article for this query would have extremely high bounce rates and if Google sent that page traffic, they'd just see people rebound. I guess, part of the question then becomes, how do you show up high enough for Google to see you have a sticky site. The answer, I guess, is to already have an authority site Google trusts & that Google sees getting social engagement/shares/natural backlinks.