Here is a piece I wasn’t going to write because I am as guilty of making assumptions as anyone is. When I say that you shouldn’t assume that your customers already know what you want to teach, at least in the way you want to teach it, I should take my own advice.
Even though it is not necessarily teaching, writing that hopes to be informative has the same strictures. I shouldn’t assume that everybody has already considered a subject, or that I might not have a way of presenting it that resonates with some of my audience.
So today’s subject is nothing less than… the future of your business.
Every web site needs content. At the minimum there has to be a pretense that there is worthwhile information on the site to anchor whatever advertising is being promoted. In today’s environment it seems that it is possible to accomplish this by using content that is marginal at best. It’s all bout convincing the search engines to give sites credit they might or might not actually deserve.
The search engines know this and sooner or later they will figure out how not to be fooled. Google’s Panda update should be seen as a warning shot across the bow. Panda was just a broad brush that downgraded sites that were known to be rife with questionable content. Eventually Google will figure out how to do the same thing with individual sites.
I already have a WordPress plugin that evaluates the grade level of the writing I put on a site. Now I don’t know how far it is from being able to figure out grade level to being able to analyze quality of writing, but I do know that Google has a lot more money than a lone plugin developer, and a vested interest in figuring this out.
It’s reasonable to assume that in the future the quality of the content on your site will become an ever more important factor.
If you are in the habit of buying marginal content for your site the problem is not that in the future you will have to purchase better quality content n order to maintain your ranking. The problem is that you might wake up one day with no ranking at all.
Now, no-one knows exactly when this will happen, and it’s only an assumption. But I think it is a warranted one. At the very least, if you are buying content to use on your various sites you should be thinking about this. I do.
