SEO Interviews, And A Rant About Relevancy
SEO Buzzbox has been running some great interviews lately.
Today, it's Greg Boser.
"build great content for humans and everything else will take care of itself I would say that a couple of years ago, there was a lot of truth to that statement. Today, I think its a bit naive. Theres simply more to it than that"
Greg is right, and this is a problem in any saturated market.
We operate in an attention economy with a very low barrier to entry. Companies, or new websites, that enter saturated markets late have always needed to spend more time/money/energy than the first movers in order to be noticed. As Greg notes, it is thus no surprise that a link economy has emerged.
Moving on from what Greg said, I think the concepts of quality and relevancy (as they relate to content) are often used interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing.
Is Britney more relevant to the average person than Mozart? Probably. How about the intrinsic quality of the music? Apples and oranges.
The search engines look to provide relevancy to the majority of searchers, which is not necessarily the same thing as quality, especially the quality as perceived by the site owner about his/her own site. It is not enough to have great content, the content must also be voted on (i.e. become more popular). It's not an ideal world, online or off.
Should new content be given equal chance in the serps?
Maybe. News, certainly. Blog content, quite probably. In order for this type of content to be relevant, it must also be timely, which is why the search engines have separate recency algos.
But how about general information, say, on cancer? Do the current results necessarily need to change much in the medium term? In other words, would allowing new sites an equal shot at the keyword term "cancer" on a month-by-month basis, provide more relevancy to most searchers?
If the serps were easy to manipulate, and/or there was a constant flood of new entrants, I doubt it. I don't think the search engines are that clever, or have the architecture required to provide on-the-spot quality judgements across the entire dataset.
More likely, there is an internet form of Darwinism at work, brought about by the restriction of the technology itself, the time it takes to establish group behavioural patterns, and the free-for-all nature of the internet as a whole.
Today, it's Greg Boser.
"build great content for humans and everything else will take care of itself I would say that a couple of years ago, there was a lot of truth to that statement. Today, I think its a bit naive. Theres simply more to it than that"
Greg is right, and this is a problem in any saturated market.
We operate in an attention economy with a very low barrier to entry. Companies, or new websites, that enter saturated markets late have always needed to spend more time/money/energy than the first movers in order to be noticed. As Greg notes, it is thus no surprise that a link economy has emerged.
Moving on from what Greg said, I think the concepts of quality and relevancy (as they relate to content) are often used interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing.
Is Britney more relevant to the average person than Mozart? Probably. How about the intrinsic quality of the music? Apples and oranges.
The search engines look to provide relevancy to the majority of searchers, which is not necessarily the same thing as quality, especially the quality as perceived by the site owner about his/her own site. It is not enough to have great content, the content must also be voted on (i.e. become more popular). It's not an ideal world, online or off.
Should new content be given equal chance in the serps?
Maybe. News, certainly. Blog content, quite probably. In order for this type of content to be relevant, it must also be timely, which is why the search engines have separate recency algos.
But how about general information, say, on cancer? Do the current results necessarily need to change much in the medium term? In other words, would allowing new sites an equal shot at the keyword term "cancer" on a month-by-month basis, provide more relevancy to most searchers?
If the serps were easy to manipulate, and/or there was a constant flood of new entrants, I doubt it. I don't think the search engines are that clever, or have the architecture required to provide on-the-spot quality judgements across the entire dataset.
More likely, there is an internet form of Darwinism at work, brought about by the restriction of the technology itself, the time it takes to establish group behavioural patterns, and the free-for-all nature of the internet as a whole.
