Could this be the end of sucky content?
by Mechele Shoneman / 22 August 2012 / Blogs, Google, Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Plus, Linkedin, local marketing, Marketing, Online marketing, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube / 0 Comment
There’s a great piece in INC about the ever-growing tide of junk content slowly drowning out original, thoughtful and interesting quality content. This junk content is what many low lying digital marketers refer to as ‘SEO fuel’ or simply ‘SEO marketing’.
These are the articles written in 20 minutes or less, press releases that regurgitate the same idea in 25 different ways or the blog posts that repeat a keyword phrase 3 times in a single
stifling sentence ...aka. “For sublime marketing in NJ, get to know a marketing in NJ firm that prides itself on being a premier resource for marketing in NJ.”
Great right? Google brought this on with an algorithm that rewards the most frequently updated content. It has set the standard for other content hubs like Twitter, where you simply disappear if you don't tweet often enough because some software will automatically un-follow you. So people continue to tweet stale content or in most cases retweet. Did you know close to 80% of the content on Twitter are retweets? It’s like going to a party and the host hands you a martini glass of someone else’s backwash. Eww.
There is some hope, or at least relief for original content writers out there. Google’s multi-part Panda and Penguin updates penalize content “repackagers” and “keyword stutters” that repeat, repeat, repeat. Even Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are attempting to stem the tide and retain the founding spirit of the perennial micro-blogging site.
They announced recently that they’re "rethinking publishing” and creating an online medium (named Medium) dedicated to the idea that the quality of content matters. "Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced," Williams writes in his opening Medium post.
Could this be the start of the end for sucky content?
If Google and Twitter can effectively mirror the egalitarian approach of sites like Tumblr and Flipboard that effectively roll up aged media, old and new media, branded media and quality social media, the writers, thinkers and innovators of the web have a shot.
And, we won’t have to click to page 3 of our Google results to finally get some meaningful content besides Wikipedia.