This is my first post on this blog, and I thought I should address right away one of the greatest SEO myths, which is that quality content is important for Google rank.
The vast majority of SEO advice recommends that you publish “high-quality” articles, images, and so on. It says that if you do, the search engines will “love” it and somehow reward you by ranking you higher for the keywords that it’s relevant for.
Really, there are several statements and assumptions in this point of view of SEO, ergo:
- High-quality content exists,
- Google measures content quality,
- It compares yours with that of other sites,
- The higher your quality compared to that of other webpages relevant for the same keyword, the better your rank.
I could focus on any of these four points and explain why they’re wrong, but let’s start from the top. If the first one is wrong, all the rest are by extension wrong.
And to do this, let me ask you: what makes music “high quality”? Is high-quality music an objective reality or a subjective opinion? Is there any kind of objective scale for the quality of music?
You probably realised there is no such thing. Sure, tyou and every one you know probably has their own standards, but there is no impossd universal standard for quality music. That doesn’t exist.
Now ask yourself the same thing about an article (or image, or video, or any other indexable file). Do you really believe there is an objective, unfudgeable measure for content quality?
I hope you realise there isn’t. This just doesn’t exist. Unlike the metre, the litre, the degree or the volt, we don’t have a “content quality” scale. It simply doesn’t exist.
Sure, your favourite SEO plugins will try to define one based on factors like paragraph length, sentence length, consecutive sentences starting with the same word, and so on, but this is all arbitrary. What makes a shorter sentence objectively better than a longer one?
Now, let’s imagine we tried to create one. We may take into account things like spelling, breadth of vocabulary, writing style, ease of reading and word count.
- Spelling: all else being equal, misspelled words are bad. But some spelling errors doesn’t necessary mean the whole article is bad quality.
- Grammar: this varies region to region, and different writing styles require different grammar rules.
- Breadth of vocabulary: this can’t be a factor. Again, different situations require different vocabulary. You can’t impose it from the top down.
- Word count: Does a short poem automatically have less value than a long political essay because it has less words? Does a quick landing page have lower quality than a book because it’s short and snappy?
I hope you realise that these factors – and any other you may imagine – are completely arbitrary. There is no objective standard for content quality.
And if you spend any length of time looking at the search engines results pages (AKA SERPS) or trying to rank a page for any term, you’ll realise that it doesn’t matter whether you add words, delete words, spice up your vocab, or stuff more information into your article.
None of this contributes to content quality, and Google doesn’t care about any of it.
And since the first claim is wrong, it means the second, third and fourth are wrong too. So, to be absolutely clear before we wrap up:
The search engines DO NOT measure quality of content, because you cannot measure quality.
The search engines DO NOT compare the quality of different sites, because you cannot measure quality.
The search engines DO NOT reward you for having the best content, because there’s no such thing.
And, just to remind you:
Content quality does not exist as an objective, measurable quantity.