„The content is king”This has been on the air for years. Is it starting to get boring?
I know. Me too.
In today's article, I will unravel the hand-written and encrypted code shrouded in the mists of the past – and along with it, I will outline where this whole „the content is king” trend came from.
Performing well in search engines – without proper content...
A search engine optimization has changed incredibly over the past few years.
Ten years ago, anyone who could, built links in industrial quantities.
You did, I did.
Then came the Google Webspam Team and they put together one of the most controversial algorithm updates, Google Penguin. With this, they dealt a huge blow to the link-building industry and sowed the seeds of a new trend in search engine optimization. You are right, this is where everything started that later led to the mass emergence of „a content is king” type blog posts.
One of the most important „legs” of search engine optimization has traditionally been link building. A lot of SEO providers offered link building and the price competition pushed the industry in a pretty bad direction. You could encounter ridiculous offers: for a few dollars, you could arrange for your website to receive fifty or a hundred incoming links. If you repeated this a few times, you already had several hundred or even thousands of incoming links? which was enough to get your website good rankings in search engines. Without proper content...
This is where it all started: Google Penguin
Google clearly saw this trend. They identified the patterns and launched the Google Penguin algorithm update, which significantly disrupted both sides of the search engine optimization industry: the client side and the service provider side. What did this penguin do?
The Penguin algorithm update weeded out the artificially built-up pages from Google's search results – or penalized them with serious downgrades. This simultaneously pulled the rug out from under the link-building companies and their clients.
Google's explanation for the Penguin rampage was that artificial link building means manipulating the search results, so the spam link building practice cannot remain. Let's say there was some truth in it, because you could still slice it without proper content – if, for example, you bought 3-4-5000 incoming links to your site...
One of the guarantees of Google's market dominance is that it serves users with exceptionally relevant search results. With the Penguin algorithm update, Google (in 2012) clearly showed that if the SEO industry jeopardizes this relevance, they will easily overturn the table and force the players in the SEO industry to find other sources of income than building spam links.
Wave of outrage
Until the moment of the Penguin algorithm update, no one had stated what the consequences would be if SEO providers „misled” users of Google's search engine through mass link building. Before the execution of the Penguin algorithm update, it was common that it was NOT those contents, NOT those websites that performed well in the results, which served users well. It was those pages that performed well who engaged in spam link building.
It may not be an exaggeration to say that it was the first time Google clearly showed that it was ready to defend its market position fiercely. Even if it meant companies had to go bankrupt. Has the paint started to peel off Google's „Don't be evil” motto?
A zero click searches I have also written about its expansion here on the Marketing Secrets blog – read it!
Who suffered the greatest damages?
On the client side, those suffered the greatest damages who had artificial link building as their main search engine optimization technique and search as the most important traffic source.
There were cases where companies went bankrupt because they had no traffic source other than Google search. The website could have received a serious downgrade (or even completely disappeared from the results) after the Penguin algorithm update. If any of these occurred, the entire traffic disappeared overnight – and of course, so did the revenue.
SEO expert Josh Bachynski has repeatedly raised the issue of Google's ethical standards and voiced his concerns about „penalty algorithms,” but this did not change anything.
„The rise of the ”Content is King" trend
Since 2012, it has become increasingly clear that Google is pushing the search engine optimization market towards a natural link profile. John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst @ Google) has stated countless times that Google advises against forcing artificial link building.
His advice is to write high-quality, informative, and entertaining content – and not to force link building. Let the incoming links arrive as a natural process. This natural link building is a Google philosophy where the webmaster or SEO expert has less influence. The essence of the natural process is that we do not interfere.
If we lived in a test tube and everything was sterile, it might be useful advice to wait for incoming links to build up naturally. As long as there is competition and rivals, waiting for natural link building does not seem to be a profitable strategy.
This is a cat-and-mouse situation: the SEO industry works, builds links, optimizes, while Google tries to filter out as effectively as possible those techniques that are suitable for manipulating the results list.
