If you’ve ever taken any of my advice on website content, it usually boiled down to this one word:
Quality
And for those of you who have not heeded my words, your day of reckoning has come. Here’s what’s going on…
Google has updated its algorithm to improve results. Loosely translated, this means that if your site isn’t useful, or if it’s full of useless content, then your ranking might be impacted negatively. According to Google:
Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible…This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on…
So, if you’ve posted useless page after useless page of content to your website or blog, you might want to reconsider your efforts and implement a content strategy that’s actually useful to your visitors. 
The second way this impacts your rankings is if you put a lot of effort into content marketing back when it was wildly popular and might have actually produced results. Because Google is labeling large content sites (think ezinearticles.com and Yahoo! Associated Content) as quasi-content farms, links from these places are no longer as trustworthy as they used to be. And, we all know the value of trust when it comes to links and SEO.
If you’ve got a lot of useless content on your site:
- Stop adding it. Get some real help and start adding useful content on a regular basis.
- Consider removing content that hasn’t been indexed yet or has low pagerank.
- Start asking yourself (or better yet, ask your customers) what content is useful to them.
If you’ve got a lot of articles on someone else’s content farm:
- Stop adding it. It’s time to shift your content creation to your own domain(s) is you haven’t already done this.
- Be picky about where you put your content from now on.
- Think about contributed blog posts or starting an external blog that you can link to your site and sites that are related to, but don’t compete with, you.
If you ask me, the content “big bang” is over. Now the concept of content is contracting back to your website with the exception of the quality sites that you might get one or two links from in the form on contributed blog posts and, of course, serious websites (sorry ezinearticles, but I don’t take you that seriously) that have some sort of news or content value.
Jason
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