Google-friendly content is the most overused word in the industry today. As a content marketer, its one of the phrases I probably use every day – sometimes to push my team of writers to create better stuff, sometimes to the editors to make them understand what the client wants, sometimes to the client who want rankings on Google but does not want to invest in a good blog. And, then there is the client who just wants quality content, no matter what. So what is this Google-friendly, quality content? Is there any standard definition for it? Who decides what content we should use? The answer to all these questions, at least in the world of search engines, lies with Google. Quality content is important, says Google. And so good quality content is important. That’s it. What Google wants And to do that Google started introducing major changes to its algorithms, starting 2002. Although there have been more than 500 algorithm changes till date, the major ones like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and the Pigeon, have changed the way search engine marketing works. The intent of every algorithm change is to improve search results and make search more relevant. This also means that Google is watching over its content and making sure that only relevant and quality content gets ranked for every query that is made. What does this mean to content marketers and writers? Taken together, this means that shoddily written content churned out by content farms and SEO companies for manipulating rankings results will no longer work. Google wants you to write what will make sense to the user. It does not want you to create content by obsessing over keywords but rather write it to answer a particular question and create value. The meaning and intent of an article hence becomes more important than just keywords. An advanced research project recently undertaken by engineers and leaders at MOZ and SEMrush point to just this. Over 203,900 data points were analyzed to see what type of content really mattered to Google. The research showed that the quality of content was the most decisive factor in helping it rank. So what are the quality guidelines according to Google? This is what I am arriving at. Google values good content and rewards you with traffic if you create high quality. That is no secret. In fact, Google has even written a complete section on creating valuable content. Google’s mission has always been to help each search user to get the exact information they are looking for in the quickest amount of time. As Larry Page states in this video, Google wants to organize the world’s information and give people the exact thing that they are looking for. Based on Google’s own quality guidelines, we have created a list of 13 content mistakes that Google wants you to avoid. Avoid these and you can pretty much be assured that you will land in Google’s good books. So here we go. 1. Don’t use auto-generated content Creating a tonne of quality content takes a lot of hard work and time. But there really is no easy shortcut. At times, we may be tempted to use programmatic help to generate content quickly but cast the thought aside as soon as you have it. Google’s algorithm has grown smarter by the day. It can now not only catch lazy and copied writing but also penalize you badly for it. Here’s what to look out for – Don’t literally translate text When translating text from another language, see to it that the final output actually makes sense and is not a literal word-to-word translation. A literal translation often jumbles up the grammar and brings down the quality of the output. For eg: Avoid synonymizing or obfuscation techniques Synonymized plagiarism is one of the emerging threats in the content sector. While plagiarism checkers check for direct copy pastes, replacing the text with words of similar meaning can cloak it to pass on as an original piece of content. Google has fortunately seen through this and set up a penalty for it. Stitching content from different web pages without adding sufficient value There are two aspects to the above statement – the first being that you are already doing non-original content by taking it from other web pages and the second being that you aren’t adding “value” to it. This is a common problem seen with “listicle” articles that tend to quickly make a top-10 list without adding sufficient reasoning for the ratings. If you want to do this, make sure there is enough original content on the page to anchor the article. 2. Be careful about your redirects Setting up redirects is a common practice and is often done for genuine reasons. We often consolidate content from different pages into one page and then redirect the old urls. We also set up redirects when we are moving our site to a new address. Sadly, some online touts have used redirects to create a veil of cloaked content, which takes users and search engines to different pages. Search engines like Google prioritize user experience as a key ingredient in their ranking. This makes such cloaking activities an offence punishable with a huge penalty that could take a lot of time to recover from. 3. Opt only for genuine links Links have been used and abused consistently to sometimes gain ranks and other times game the search engine into believing that your website had authority. Fortunately, Google shut down link farms and black hat practices to a good extent. Even then, if you get your hands on some old reading material for building links, you may be tempted to try these spurious practices. Stay away from- The old practices of buying links, using link directories or randomly posting in forums are all considered bad practices. Paid advertorials are also under the scanner and will be prohibited from giving out link juice
