The importance of great content

Writing good content for your site is not a new concept. Content is king after all. However with Googles recent shift in gear, (cranking up its indexing to Caffeine level) to cope with the sheer weight of content being produced online, there is an ever more compelling need to be sure the content you produce is quality and visible amongst the endless quagmire of mediocrity and spam.

Caffeine is “a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online”. What does this mean at this stage? Well exactly what it says on the tin: Caffeine is in it’s infancy but has been built with the future of ever increasing content creation in mind.

Google also announced the ‘may day update’ (around May time surprisingly) which is an algorithmic change to place more focus on long tail searches. Long tail focus is a win for online content because Google will now put relevance on deeper content with less focus on domain authority and greater focus on tail terms and deep links. Going on the Pareto principle 80-20 theory of the long tail then we are looking at an algorithmic shift in the worlds biggest search engine that actually favours the non-hits (or at least is trying harder to find them).

A quote from Matt Cutts in this video:

“…we’re trying to assess the quality of sites that match up to long-tailed queries…”

Assessing the quality – of course Google will continue to tweak this algorithm change to perform as smoothly as possible. Combine this with Caffeine (“an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online” – remember) and you have Google indexing pages, faster and in higher quantity with additional focus on the 80% of that 80-20 split getting users to deeper product pages and quality content faster.

If you’re into rotoscoping and close ups of Matt Cutts (or if you just want to learn the nuts and bolts of how Google finds what you’re looking for) then this is a neat little video.