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A recent webchat with a top Google executive answered the eternal question about content on websites and blogs – is quantity important? It’s a generally held belief within the SEO world that a longer article is preferable to something short and snappy but is this the case? Google seems to think not, but with a few caveats.

Content Quality

The perception is that longer articles are better quality, because they give more comprehensive information on a topic under discussion. That’s undeniably true – a 700 word explanation on a complex topic is going to cover more ground than a 200 word article. However, if the writing is poor quality and stuffed with filler language, or the article simply repeats the same few points multiple time, the length is irrelevant – it’s still a poor quality article, despite the length. Google confirmed that simply adding more text to a page is not a way of improving its ranking on a webpage.

If you can say everything you need to say, clearly and concisely, in a couple of hundred words, then according to Google that’s what is important. The search engine will identify the quality of the information and rank it accordingly – adding another few hundred words in an attempt to make the page seem more authoritative won’t make any difference.

Thin Content

On the other hand, the term “thin content” is often used to mean a page which contains such a short paragraph of text that Google won’t rank it as it’s too short. This isn’t really true either. Thin content is less about length of text, and more about the information conveyed. A page which rambles on for a thousand words saying very little is equally “thin” as a 100 word statement, again of little use to the reader.

So How Do I Improve My Content?

So if improving content isn’t just about going back to your existing pages and making them longer, what is the best way of improving search engine rankings? The first thing to look at is the aim of the web page. Ask yourself what message you are trying to get across with any particular page and whether the text you have achieves that aim. That might mean an entire rewrite, or just removing sections and tweaking language used.

Lost Relevance

Content sometimes loses relevance over time because technology moves on or words subtly change meaning. A page which was entirely relevant three or five years ago might be totally useless now, so will score poorly on the quality score. A good example for this is someone searching for films to watch. A couple of years ago, Google would have interpreted this as meaning cinemas, and presented a list of local cinemas and showing times. Over the last year, with cinemas closed, the search is more likely to mean movies to stream at home, and Google has adjusted its results accordingly. If you are finding that your website is attracting significantly less traffic than a year or two ago, could it have lost relevance?