Content creation and length, useful indications from Google
Which one is the right length for a content? This is one of the “million dollar questions” of the SEO, one of those topics that cyclically returns to the center of the debate and that polarizes the positions, between those who think that the word count is a crucial estimate, to be observed almost religiously, and those who instead minimizes its weight. We also talk about this in the sixth episode of SEO Mythbusting season 2, indeed dedicated to the content and the many false myths that surround this topic.
False myths about content and word count
To keep Google’s Martin Splitt company is Lily Ray, SEO director of Path Interactive, and together the two experts dispel the myths as “more content equals better quality” or if the word count is a ranking factor, and offer advice on what to do in the event of low-performance content and more.
And it is exactly Ray to open the episode, asking what is the best strategy for a publisher who publishes regularly on the same topic every year, with only slightly different content: better to create new articles or update the old ones?
How to manage routine content
Lily Ray cites a concrete example to clarify the issue, that of a site that publishes an article to describe “a certain type of beauty treatment, and speaks in 2017 and 2018 and 2019”. So, what is the best practice recommended by Google? “Take that content and update it every year, or publish three different pages on the same topic“?
According to Splitt, the optimal answer is that in principle – unless the news is distorted – it would be better to work on updating the already published contents and avoid publishing articles on very similar topics or that essentially say the same thing, also because this is likely to be seen as a case of content duplication by Google, which will operate a canonicalization regardless of the settings indicated by the publisher.
To avoid this problem, therefore – which could lead to only one article “visible” and others relegated to simple reproductions discarded by the search engine – it is advisable to undertake to update the existing page, intervening with modifications to the sentences to make them more current, and especially reposition it better to make it more visible on the site, maybe approaching the home page.
How much content we need according to SEO?
We then move on to deal with another hot topic of SEO, which is the minimum amount of content you need to have good performance on Google. It’s always Lily Ray who introduces the speech, bringing back the point of view of many companies that think it’s necessary to produce a lot