Google’s Errors and the Importance of Content in SEO.

In a recent Webmaster tools video Matt Cutts talks about a couple of mistakes that Google have made in the past. Aside from being nice to see that the search giant is human after all, Matt Cutts highlighted two examples that came to mind.

He explains that Google should have acted quicker to snuff out paid links. This was only brought to his attention at a conference a few years ago where an SEO told him that paid links were too prevalent and that Google would never be able to create an algorithm to get rid of them, after which Cutts realized they had let paid links go too far.

The Penguin and Panda algorithm changes worked though, because now paid links are frowned upon and don’t feature in any SEO campaign and they have turned the way SEO is done on it’s head.

His second point was content farms. Cutts has been sounding off a lot recently about how important content is becoming to rank well. A big shift from a few years ago where a main ranking factor was backlinks, content has become the buzzword for SEOs everywhere. Backlinks, despite still being a ranking factor, are becoming less and less important and in one Webmaster tools video Matt Cutts said backlinks need to be more relevant to where they are pointing to be effective.

Cutts mentioned that he was aware of content farms but over-generalised and assumed – wrongly – that most of them did contain quality information but it was mixed in with a whole lot of poor content. This assumption was made because he once found some information on a content farm that helped him fix his broken toilet.

The moral of the story here is that one piece of good content will not save your website. If you’ve not added anything or updated your site for a long while, it would be very unlikely that putting one up to date, high quality article on there would suddenly recover your rankings.

What Google are looking for is regular high quality content that provides a great resource of information without being surrounded by awful articles. It will be worth your time and effort to dedicate some time to regularly update your content on your site, as it will pay dividends in the rankings.