That "Content is King" line is going to be with us for a long time. I think even the next gen of Internet users will still here that same line when it comes to being found on the Net. I kinda see his standpoint there, because there are some SEO people who are using SEO to "game" the system. From that, I assumed that it's only the black hat people that he's pointing at. Well, I do hope it's just the black hat people because the title's pretty general, if you ask me.

SEO will never die no matter how much content is king. You can write high quality content and still have your SEO.

By the way I love this line on that blog post

If 'Content is King' then what about a Business website?

If I go onto a website which sells nuts, bolts and screws, are they also going to have write a blog about 'nuts, bolts and screws' full of 'epic new fresh unique content'?

How about if a site is really good for providing a quick easy price matrix on nuts, bolts and screws. Am I not going to find them as someone has a similar site with inferior products, poor price transparency yet has 100 pages of blog posts tacked on?

Also, are you telling me a site full of amazing unique content is going to do any good without backlinks and social signals and other basic SEO?

I think the problem is that Google can't tell which content is quality content. After all, it's just a machine.

BS, nothing but BS. SEO is incredibly important, and Google knows it. Google does backlinking all the time for their own services.

For example, has anyone heard what happened to Chrome? Their rankings dropped recently, because Google broke their own ToS. They bought high PR links from other websites to catapult the Chrome page above IE, Firefox, etc.

Nothing but hypocrisy.

PS: Google only dropped the Chrome PR by one point for 60 days, and that's because people found out what they were doing. If any other website does this, they get a huge drop in SERPs.

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Social signals.

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But seriously, Ive seen sites that have HORRIBLE seo, and yet seemingly great content.

Where are they in the SERPS?

....nowhere.

Quality content is SEO. Think about that for a moment please.

Personally, I find SEO to be effective and never believe what a Google employee says about anything

Do ya think Google is going to disclose how to achieve real rankings? They will never, its all about testing & finding the good way to do niche specific SEO to achieve top rankings. Just my two cents

Cheers
Ciel!

Remember that Google doesn't want webmasters to have any influence over where their sites are in the SERPS (other than doing the bare minimum of SEO -just enough to let Google know what a particular page is about).

When it comes to SEO, the easier something is for the webmaster to control the less impact it has with Google.

And the harder something is to control the more impact it has.

For example:

Easy: Putting a keyword in your <title> an <h> tags takes seconds an is easy to do. It will help with SEO but won't have a great impact.

Hard: Getting 10 authority websites to link to your site is much more diificult to organize. It will have a massive impact.

Google are always going to discourage webmasters to spend time on SEO but that doesn't mean that it doesn't work.

That's just a BS line that Google comes out with to try and discourage new SEOs from solely on backlinks. Truth is that you can have great content and no backlinks, therefore no rankings. But you can have awful content and great backlinks, therefore greating rankings.

Obviously Google isn't going to say this because more people would try and game the search engine more than they do now. The real long term SEO approach isn't just supplying great content, it's great content and great backlinks.

You should qualify that statement. It depends on much more then that!

When I see that content is King it backs up what I keep seeing about bounce rate. If your bounce rate is low, your rankings go up - or at least thats what I keep seeing, hearing and reading.

A low bounce rate means that your keeping visitors on your site, your providing an answer to a search query, therefore your content is good quality and what a searcher is after, then google ranks you higher.

To me good content = low bounce rate = higher ranking

If you added a video that kept a visitors attention and reduced your bounce rate wouldnt that be classed as good content?

One of the post Panda factors is engaging content, what do videos do? They engage site visitors to stay a little longer on the site.

This is the goal of all search engines.

Basically, the ability to use SEO and get higher rankings for your website is a bug in the system, and it's treated as a bug. Every search engine team is trying to find a way that SEO can be stomped on like the distasteful vermin they think it is.

Unfortunately, they have to make a certain tradeoff, namely that they cannot possibly examine every single web page they index... not closely enough to detect and squash all the SEO, anyway.

So as long as your site is a tiny little corner of the web that doesn't matter to anyone, none of the search engines give a crap. You don't get enough traffic to piss off enough people to be worth their time. And that's why the MFA empires that actually work have thousands of sites across dozens of niches on multiple hosting accounts: if you were getting all that traffic in one place, the search engines would start paying attention.

But if your keywords are only getting a few hundred searches a month, and each of your sites is only getting a few dozen visitors a day, nobody at Google or Bing or wherever gives a crap what you're doing. It is just as easy for them to stomp on JC Penney's little SEO scheme as it is to stomp on yours, but stomping on yours will only improve the search experience of a few hundred people. It isn't worth their time.

It's just like drugs. If you sit around your house alone smoking weed you grow yourself, chances are you will never get arrested. If you fire up a major operation producing marijuana and hash oil for nationwide distribution, chances are you will be caught and arrested and never get out of jail. So while SEO on your own little micro-niche sites will probably not get you in trouble, selling your "guaranteed page one service" to people building huge authority sites in popular niches will probably be a short ride.

What good is content if your site has no backlinks and you are ranked #300? I hate google and their disinformation in statements like this. It's just them trying to manipulate you... You can have a great site with great content and if it has NO SEO work done no-one is going to find you, period.

I have a site with two 850 word articles...thats IT! And I have been backlinking it throughout the year as it maintains prominent positions on the first page of Google for highly competitive keywords....no upating at all.

I have other pages that I keep fresh content on all the time, but don't need to SEO....because of no backlinks, they appear no where within the first 5 pages of the SERPS.

Id like to see this debunked.

Two members start identical sites.

One with SEO and the other with "quality content"

I know which site Ill be putting my money on!

Content is king only with SEO. I myself has experienced this. I had posted regularly about 15 articles all 500+ words all unique and to be very frank that site was not even in top 100 nor top 200 neither 500. Google was evolved with the concept of backlinks and it can never devalue them.

Some of you guys are forgetting the almighty variable..what your competitors are doing to rank well within the serps. Content isn't just King with SEO. As someone mentioned above, social cues are playing more and more in how Google finds a site relevant or not. Yea, I can throw together a 10-15 page site today on a good microniche category and get it to rank fairly quickly..why?

Because the top 10-15 sites for my targeted subject matter (notice I didn't say keywords) have done a poor job of doing anything remotely worthwhile in getting their rank placement or keeping their rank placement. In my eyes, it's almost unfair with what I'm about to do to that little niche. It's like placing an nfl linebacker into a pee wee league game to sack a little kid quarterback.

But the reason I can say it with that much authority, is because it's been proven time and time again. Smaller niches are easier to dominate. National niches, subject matter..a littler harder. You just need to branch out from your usual article marketing, and backlinking. Start building seo profiles about what you need to do and stick to it. It's all about being relevant to the reader and to Google. Show them you have fast site for quick user interaction. Show them you're being talked about on Twitter and Facebook (and yes even Myspace). Show them you're in directories.

Pro-tip folks: Google doesn't just have one index. Several of their trusted "algorhythms" will take input from one index and add it to the other to build on whether a site is relevant/trusted/good/etc.

I think we should pay attention to what Google actually does, instead of what they say they do (which are often two completely different things).

They throw up so many SEO "smokescreens" it's not even funny. Not that I blame them, because they know that if they didn't do that, a lot more people would realize how (relatively) easy it is to manipulate their search results.

Just sayin'.

Content IS king, but you have to get people those to read it... Hello SEO.

The real question is what you are doing with your traffic.

If you can get thousands of people to come to your site by writing articles that rank well for the term "bite my wiener," that does not mean a damn thing unless you are somehow going to get money from those people.

That means you need to have ads people will click on, or products they will buy. You can't just have some random ad or some random product. You need something that people who are searching for "bite my wiener" actually care about. Like special wiener condiments or something. ("Now in mesquite barbecue!")

Now, which of those things do you suppose is usually the problem? Do you think you aren't making money because your site doesn't rank high enough for "bite my wiener," or is it because you don't have anything those people want?

Because if you insist on making it a numbers game, the very least you can do is look at the right number.

Saying that SEO isn't important is waaaaaaay to broad of a statement.

Just like saying that content is king is waaaaaaaaaaay to broad of a statement.

Neither can be completely true because there are contradictory scenarios for each rule.

However, the biggest problem with the Content is King vs. SEO statement to me is that SEO in itself is a dynamic strategy.

I mean think about it...What does SEO stand for? Search engine optimization.

SEO will ALWAYS stand for one thing, and that is: "Optimization with the goal of increased traffic through search engines". SEO isn't a static set of practices or techniques that stays the same year after year through algorithm change after algorithm change, it is a dynamic, constantly shifting set of techniques that is incorporated into everything from publishing content to promoting it.

SEO does not just refer to spamming article directories and pointing Xrumer blasts. If you want to have ANY hope of getting search traffic, then to say that SEO isn't important is in effect saying that promotion isn't important.

Content is not king; the king is the person who does the best job of getting eyes on their content, which by definition means taking into account the state and structure of Google's algorithm...

Unless you're not even trying to get search traffic, but then it seems obvious that SEO wouldn't be important. Right?

Can anybody link to where Jonathan Rockway made the statements quoted by Apex Pacific? I'd just like to read his quotes with more surrounding context.

And by the way, anything you do to gain search engine visibility, including producing good content, can be considered SEO, which makes the statement, "How To SEO Is Not Important Because Content Is King", somewhat paradoxical. I think they were talking about techniques commonly regarded as blackhat though.

You should not believe on everything you read.. SEO will work until search engine is based on a algorithm...

When people say things like "what use is good content when no-one ever finds the site it's on to read it" I can sympathize but they are missing the point of good content.

Content is not good on its own, without anyone reading it. For it to 'be' good there must be other people who consider it good.

The question is good for what?

good for a laugh
good because it offers useful information
good because it is an interesting read
etc.

We can say that content is good if there are people who find it useful.

The more specific an article (or video) the fewer people there will be who find it good (for whatever reason).

The broader an article (or video) the more people there will be who find it good.

There will be less search engine competition for the very specific content then there will be for the more general content.

On top of this, the more general content is the less good/useful it will be. One general article about autoresponders, dog bowls, political humour, tends to be not much better (or worse) than hundreds of other similar articles. The 'use-value' of each individual article is low (even if it's nicely written and making a valid point).

An article that only 50 people a month will find good/useful (because it caters for a very specific need) will probably have no trouble at all being found by all those 50 people through a simple Google search.

An article that only 500 people a month are looking for will probably face a bit more competition but if it is better than the competition - in that it is more useful - it will fare better in the search engines.

Why it fares better is down to various factors:

• The articles or video tend to be (but are not always) longer. People spend longer on the site.
• People tend to recommend more useful sites (no-one recommends blog containing 500 near-indentical posts all promoting the same weight-loss supplement). More useful sites are the ones with better articles.
• Longer articles, written naturally, work better than shorter, keyword stuffed articles.

So what do you do with (potentially) good content?

If it is an article or video on a very broad subject with a wide appeal - and you don't have an established website - then your best bet is to get this content on an established website. Get your name know and soon people will be seeking out your site. Traffic will come from your syndicated article, from links people have left in forums and on other blog posts.

If it an an article or video on a very specific subject with a limited appeal then the chances are that you won't need an established website for people searching Google to find it. You can give yourself a hand by finding discussion forums where this select group meet an making a post dropping your link. No-one will mind or call it spam because you are linking to a genuinely useful article.

In short, if the content you have created is good - you can always find people to read/watch it.

Google cannot tell quality--they can only spot indicators that typically accompany quality posts. But, rather than try and buffalo them, why not do quality anyway? The visitors to your site, not Google....or Yahoo and Bing are the ultimate graders of the site.

Google only have their own interests in mind. Artificial link-building is a pain for Google to deal with, so they'd much rather lie and tell us all that the only thing that matters is quality content.

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I'm the contrarian, don't build any content on your site or focus on SEO unless you know the keywords work and you've made money with paid advertising.

You want to play by Google's rules well guess what? They change and if you leave and die by SEO you will die by it too. Very few people made it with SEO, a lot have with paid advertising.

Ah, you are right about that. But what if I put a banana in it?
No, that would just be beer with a banana in it. Stupid reality, ruining my perfectly good jokes! :p

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Yep, that's a great explanation of how to use SEO, if you're going to do it. Personally, I just skip it all together and go straight to the people. They are the ones with money to give me, anyway. But it could just be my niches, which are all either too competitive or too rare to be worth putting the effort into SEO. So, I am biased in that respect.

I have a site with 600 unique articles (copyescape passed) but getting 500-600 unv only.
If the content is King then the link building is queen

Just mix both: High Quality Content + High Quality SEO (No spammy links, guys!)

The people that do best with SEO are the people that balance content and SEO, to be big you need to push the rules a little, but you need quality content to keep your rankings and even more important to bring in viewers that will buy something.

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thanks for the usfull share and i love hearing everyone's thoughts.. Really some good info. and things to think about.

Those that do great content plus great SEO will rule, as it is now.

this should be a good news. sometimes i saw some sites, they don't have enough backlinks, but still on first page.

It's like that great series The Wire (can't believe it took me so long to discover it). The SEO's are like drug dealers and Google is like the police. Every once in a while the police shakes up the boys selling dope on the corners (that would be most of you small time SEOs), but the big boys behind it are not even phased. They have hundreds or thousands of new players (sites) ready to take their place. Sometimes the police may get lucky and catch a big fish dope slinger (that would be JC Penny), but the guy will get a slap on the wrist sentence only because of all the corrupt government people (that would be Adwords) who are on the take. Then some times a druggie will get dropped or retire and the next day, the newest up and coming dude will be ready to take his place.

That's the game yo! Play or get played.

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I guess we going to have to see the hole picture all the time , all the peaces of the puzzle must be at the right place . KW content seo , links = $

I'd rather have an all-around assault to attract visitors.

I'd bet that high-quality sites will last longer than small ones made for internet marketing.

Content + SEO is king...

Google does not like the following three kind of sites..

free traffic from google search --> thin adsense websites
free traffic from google search --> affiliate sites
free traffic from google search --> lead capture pages

i think every other model looks like a 'real online business' because above three models burn the visitor from search engine immediately...

Google will have to hire a lot more people on their manual review team if they want to get rid of all SEO.

If you're seo your content should king anyways.

Content always is the king but can you make it as a king ? that a problem , that is why SEO here to assist you .

With high competitive now, quality and unique content not that easy while everyone keep doing it . That is why SEO will take part in to help as well.

Focus on both to get the fastest result. Ofcourse a Google Employee won't ask u to focus on SEO.

If Matt Cutts made a living off MFA sites, and followed his own advice, and the mantra that content is king...he would go broke.

I am not knocking quality content. I believe that sometimes, it just needs a little help.

SEO will not die anytime in the foreseeable future. It WILL change 100x over but not die. Saying seo is "not that important" is total misinformation. A COMBINATION of proper SEO and quality content is what you need. Seriously if you can't provide a higher quality user experience then the siteS already ranking for whatever keyword you're targeting dont even try you're wasting your time!

I've been really thinking lately about the folly of basing your business on Google. They're going to change things more and more. Even Market Samurai was recently effected by Google. If you're going to play the search engine game, I think it's best to go after Bing and the others, but even then, I still feel like other sources of traffic may prove superior in the long run.

Set a goal to kick Google to the curb in your business within a year. It's nice when you don't have to worry about rankings and the next big Google whim...er, I mean "update." Don't let yourself be a victim to that!

There are many ways out of the Google trap. One that's tried and true and sustainable is to build a list in your niche of choice. Before you do that, educate yourself so you have interesting and useful things to say to your list subscribers.

Then work hard to win your subscribers' trust. It's actually far easier to do this than to please the constantly changing whims of Google. Just treat your subscribers like you would appreciate being treated. Give them lots of good info... useful stuff. Be generous. Especially when they're new to your list. Then start making recommendations that, if they buy, will make you some money. If they trust you and you don't recommend just anything that comes along, guess what? You'll have a business and it won't rely one iota on Google.

Take it a step farther by creating and selling your own products/services to your subscribers. Now you're self-contained. And the only time you even think about Google is when you need to search for something.

It's about relationships. It's always been about relationships. Total reliance - even moderate reliance - on Google rankings has always been "wrong" for people serious about building sustainable businesses. A ranking is impersonal. It's spiders and robots and algorithms. It allows too many people to avoid learning how to interact to build trust and maintain business relationships with actual human beings.

It's a way to hide.

So kick that crap to the curb. Tell Google to go fly a kite. Get over your fear (if that's what has stopped you up to now) and spend all that time and money and efforts you're spending on higher rankings on offering real value and YOURSELF to those you want to do business with and make money helping in some way.

Respectfully,
John

Vital, Useful, Relevant, High Quality content that matches the search query is king, only when your site is subjected to manual scrutiny.

I believe good SEO and relevant content good or bad will rank a site high until such time it is manually rated, when all your SEO efforts may go out of the window if your content is crap.

I also believe G throws out lots of Red Herrings, and deliberately moves pages up and down at random to prevent any tracking of their activities.

my 2c

You can have the best relationships and raving fans in the world, but fact of the matter is, many people can (and will) use Google to get to your website and if you are not showing up on the first page, your competitors are...especially the ones who are smart and optimize for your business name (or via Adwords).

Yes, relationships are the key but you never want to NOT be trying to get 1st page rankings in Google for your business/product name and key market terms. If you think you don't need Google, you are wrong because it will cost you money if you don't put some effort towards ranking (in all search engines).

I totally agree and would never recommend setting up your business to rely on Google but at the same time, I would also never do the opposite. Don't count on Google but work like crazy to get (and keep) high rankings with them because it absolutely matters.

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I still haven't comprehended the full meaning of the phrase, "content is king". I create new content everyday, and distribute them to all the major channels. But still, i feel like something is missing.

good debeat, I got buyer directly not from google.

I thought that it was amusing to read through this thread and then see today's Dilbert comic.

Dilbert.com - The Official Dilbert Website with Scott Adams' color strips, Dilbert animation, mashups and more!

Almost made me suspect that Scott Adams reads the Warrior Forum!

Bill

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Content is king, this is damn right!

But Google's employees have been spreading false information about SEO and this statement is no exception.
Of course you can rank with content only, but that would take 20 years or so. LOL.

Link baits were important, are important and will remain important, PERIOD!

I'm glad you posted this as I couldn't agree more. When starting out I focused so much on SEO according to Google, now I could care less but focus solely on high-quality content. It's all about knowing how to get yourself out there without the need for Google, such as through forums, JV's, affiliates, etc.

It worries me to have to count on the search engines to tell people I exist, I'd rather get out there and let people know about me directly through methods that won't die some day.

It's hard to be constantly bothered by the worries that Google is going to yet again make another change and wipe out any hard SEO work we do. I completely agree plain and simple - content is king. Now, you need to know how to get your work in front of people's eyes, but that is completely doable without having to be a backlink-building machine 24/7.

Finding other sources of traffic without the big G is actually much easier, and more rewarding, than counting on something you have zero control over.

Without content you have,

ZERO:

Social signals. <-- Some post's on here say, required for ranking.

Consumer engagement. <-- Either a positive or negative effect on bounce rates. SEO Factor.

Customer experience. <-- Either encourages or discourages social sharing.

Reason for any "real" back linking. <-- Again required for ranking as mentioned by some peeps.


The list goes on, and while some of you may think I'm out of my head or even stupid, (I don't care either way) content is the basis and foundation of SEO, everything else is just a derivative.

yes content is kind but it is nothing without SEO techniques and i should say writing quality content is also a SEO technique

You can have unique content updated daily, but if you don't do seo would be worthless.

This thread is become more LOLERSKATES by the minute!

This is hilarious nice one CDarkLock

So you are basically saying that SEO sucks because it works ?

This is going pear shaped, Im outta here.

I agree with you. That is exactly what he should do.

hmm it seems we have sorta gotten off the topic here of SEO. So moving back if anyone wants really good information about if it still works there are a ton of resources online. Not to mention here on the Warriorforum. One site I really like is theseopub.com. Not affiliated with him in any way, but I feel that he has very good information about SEO

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Exactly unless you have a big list of article providers who are your friends and a few high up facebook devs how do you expect to get out the word about your website without Google?

For an established person who has thousands in his/her list. It is possible to not rely as much as Google, but honestly why would you to do that and leave money on the table from an effective method of gaining more subscribers? It would be like having a friend who tells you that they can promote your business and get you so much more exposure, but you say to them, I don't need you anymore I have enough promotion.

Google is that friend and once a person realizes they are not gaming the system, but instead are choosing exactly where they want to rank. They have incredible success in SEO. Let Google be your friend instead of putting it down as an old and tired method.

You can choose where you want to rank. That is the biggest realization I ever had that helped me in becoming very good at search engine optimization. Decide how much hard work you are willing to put in, or money you are willing to spend to achieve position #1 in Google. Then have a plan and do it.

Complete bull. There's no way an automated system will ever be able to dictate how well content is helping a human being. There are many different factors. Mix content with backlinks. Enough said.

Google says this OBVIOUSLY because they don't want to come out and admit that you can just backlink the hell out of sites filled with garbage. Why would they ever want us to NOT put up good content?

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Yeah, let's all change our page titles to irrelevant words and have great content, I bet we don't rank.

Just don't believe it. Please, for your own good.

I just went up to your last post Johnny with the monster eating pop corn and I finally got it lol I am quite slow tonight it seems. I think good points have been brought up by both sides too. Honestly I just do what works. I don't feel that SEO is for everyone, just like PPC isn't

If you do enough testing and tweeking measuring your results A/B and control eventually over the years you will get really close to knowing the formula, not exactly the same one but close enough to rank your sites, that is why google has to send so many mixed signals and smoke screens, to keep people guessing and changing what they where already doing, although I doubt that anyone who does SEO is going to change anything until they see their sites moving around in the SERPs

I think google is full of it, content is king if you have good content. I use to be able to rank websites without a couple of words.

i know some people who have high quality content but they still lack in ranking well.. i know some SEO who are pro but they don't have good content so they are lacking as well its just a balance that makes a website perfect to rank well..

It may be correct but SEO is important also.

What Google looks for is the content itself & he find the content from what you have done in SEO.

So they are related & having both of them in one place is the best option,

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