It has been a very well known and widely recognized fact in the SEO world that “Content is King”. This is what all the Search Engine Marketing gurus, people that work in the SEO industry and general Web Developers alike have been saying as the first basic principle of Web Development.
However, until a couple of years ago, this was just a phrase that was uttered but everyone knew the reality was. Content may have been the King, but the true work in the SEO industry was done with the help and assistance of numerous soldiers, methods that had nothing to do with the content itself.
For instance, there were link farms, directory submissions, keyword stuffing, Meta tag spam and whatnot. These methods, shady/grey hat as they might have seemed did not have any negative repercussions being given out to them. These methods thrived and people made Search Engine Optimization work through them.
The content was given a decent priority as a stand-alone mode of getting Search Engine credentials, but the other methods applied in larger quantities outshone content by miles.
As a result, content started being lesser a priority, because good and well-written content was not only hard to come by, but also expensive if it was being written by a third party.
Good content is not something everyone can come up with, and when you throw additional adjectives such as Interesting, Relevant and Newsworthy in there, the resultant mix is even rarer to come across.
So writing and coming up with good content was something that most laymen SEO’s didn’t feel like doing, it was going to consume time and resources and the end result was probably not as good as what they would have achieved with other methods in the same time frame.
However, then came the notorious Google Panda update, the update spanned a few years from 2011, 2012 and 2013 and also had a few Penguin updates put in there. What happened after the Panda update was that Content suddenly became a much bigger factor in how Search Engines ranked pages.
But not only did this become a factor, what also happened after the updates was that duplicate content, low-quality content, link farming, link building (artificial), spamming and other such methods became obsolete, extinct and some of them actually even started to cause penalties for the web pages that harboured them.
The Google Panda update firmly restored Content from being a neglected/dejected emperor to a solid, functioning and result-providing King, the supreme monarch of the, if you will Search Engine Optimization world.
Writing content, new content, new interesting content and/or new interesting relevant content may be difficult, but it is not impossible. Content is one of the primary factors for determining the rankings of a page in Search Engines now.
Google realizes this and it is time now for Website owners as well as Web Development businesses to wake up and understand the reality as well.
Here’s to an Internet, filled with what it was intended for, not links, not deceptive internet marketing tactics. No black hat tactics, not grey hat spam techniques, not poor duplicated articles, not sleazy “spun content” and not anything shady.
Here’s to an internet, full of what it was meant to have. An Internet, comprising of nothing but pure, unadulterated Information. And with that I’ll conclude this article, please leave any all comments and suggestions below! Thanks