It’s safe to say that the last year has been tough on the SEO industry as a whole. There have been numerous Google Panda updates, then Venice and now Penguin. Unfortunately, these updates haven’t been as cute as their names suggest for many website owners. Many websites are facing penalties and having to redo their content and content strategy entirely. This leaves me with one question:
Why are people still asking for article spinning and still using automatic techniques to create their content?
It’s no question as to whether or not these strategies are obsolete. They are! Google has openly said that they are penalizing for the use of these strategies, yet nothing is changing. Everyone is always looking for “easy SEO,” but SEO wasn’t meant to be easy! I see dozens of requests for content creation based purely on the use of software and low quality content.
In their latest update on the Google Inside Search blog, they’ve listed 52 changes they made in April. One of those was “No freshness boost for low-quality content.” This means that they have made a modification to ensure that low-quality content does not receive a freshness boost and therefore no boost in ranking, while their improvements on the “freshness signal” ensures that quality and fresh content will be promoted.
If you’re using software to spin content (that probably wasn’t all that great to start with) what are you trying to achieve? I see it as a waste of money. Instead of putting effort into creating spun content, why not put that effort into creating quality content that people will actually find useful? If you do, you’ll benefit much more in the long run.
Lay Off the Keywords!
Another update they made in April was a “keyword stuffing classifier improvement.” This update enables them to detect keyword stuffing more effectively and has made this classifier in search better. Google has recently stated that a keyword density over 3% is too high. In fact, I recommend that you create content with keywords in mind and use them as naturally as possible. Nobody wants to read content that has obvious keyword placements in it, it’s distracting as a reader and your reader will most likely click away quickly.
Focus More on Your Reader and Less on Google
I think these are becoming the words to live by for website owners and SEOs. It’s easy to focus on the technicalities, but what we really need to focus on is our readers. What do they want to learn? How can we provide them the information they seek?
Google tells us about the changes that affect our websites, but they’ll never tell us exactly what to do to improve our rankings. They give hints, but they’ll never tell us their secrets. By not telling us their secrets, they are able to make us focus on improving our white hat strategies and on creating amazing and useful websites. That’s what they really want. So instead of focusing on how you can “game” the search engines and make your job “easy”, focus on providing what your customers want and you’ll be rewarded by the search engines as well.
