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This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 85, explaining why content is not king. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because there is still some confusion about the reason that quality of content is not a ranking factor.
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Okay?
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So we're gonna look at it from a unique perspective today, and then we're not gonna talk about it for a while. I mean, obviously we'll discuss it on other episodes, but it's not gonna be, like, the main point like it has been. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. Anyway, I'm going to try and explain it a different way in this episode because I think people, like, understand the words quality of content is not king, but they don't, like, understand it because so many people are saying content is king. Content is king. Usually those people are trying to sell you content, by the way, claiming that it will make you rank without backlinks. It's not how SEO works. Okay, look, so, like, all right, I want you. Because, look, there are a number of types of people who try to understand SEO. There are people who understand this concept and do very well, and there are people that do not understand this concept and do not do very well.
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Okay?
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Like, everybody else in the world either tells you stuff that's wrong about SEO, like content is king, or other stuff that won't help you rank, but they say that it will help you rank. Hopefully you listen to Grumpy SEO Guy and understand why those things are Wrong. Or they just. They give you very high level suggestions, you know, and like that. That's fine. But I want you to. But I want you to understand how it's the case, okay? So this episode is going to result in you understanding why content is not king. All right, let's. Let's forget about SEO for a minute, okay? Let's think about. Let's think about pop music, okay? Actually, no, let's go back to SEO for a second. I want you to remember one thing, one thing only. Your rank is caused by an algorithm, not a human. Let's talk about music. Now, I want you to imagine that you are a developer or a programmer or something. Now, I'm not a developer and I'm also not a programmer, but let's just say that we are for the sake of discussion.
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Okay?
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I want you to imagine that you are a programmer or a developer and somebody has given you the job of determining what is a good song, okay? You have to write a program that will determine what is a good song. In other words, there is no collection of rules to follow. All you have to do is write a program that will determine if a song is good or not.
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Okay?
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That's all you have to do. Determine is a song good or not? Now I want you to think about the two possibilities for doing this. So there's kind of two roads that you could take to do this.
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Okay?
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The first road would be to write a program that understands music.
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Okay.
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Including things like preferences and biases.
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Okay.
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And use that program to figure out if a song is good or not.
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Okay.
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Do you think that's feasible? Like, let's seriously. Do you think that is plausible? Like I'm actually seriously asking you, do you think you or anybody could write a program that would do that? I don't think so. Here's your other option. Ready? Here's your other option. Do you think you could write a program that would go check the sales records of different artists and albums and see which songs are selling the most and then use that as an analog for if a song is good or not? I think that would be really rather simple compared to the first choice. Right? One of these. You have to literally teach a program how to understand music.
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Okay?
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Your other option is to just see what songs get the most downloads or purchases or whatever and just classify that as a good song.
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Okay.
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Second one is much easier, okay? That is basically what search engines are doing. They are not reading the content and understanding the content. And no, nobody, nothing. It's not. That's not how it works. It can't. Even if that was possible, I actually don't picture that as something that is possible. At least not. At least not now. But that's not how it's working. It's literally estimating goodness or quality by how much authority a website has. Why? Because more quality websites get more quality backlinks. I said that a little bit, oddly. Let's try it again. Better quality websites tend to get better quality backlinks.
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Okay.
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Therefore, by calculating authority, it knows this website likely has better quality content. I'm going to rank it higher, but it has nothing to do with the content itself.
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Okay?
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This song has way more downloads and way more purchases than any other song. Therefore, it's probably a better song.
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Okay.
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Same thing. I hope I. Guys, I don't know another way to explain this. I truly don't. If you don't understand this, maybe just play this episode again. I'm not sure how else to explain it. Okay, like, your application to determine a good quality song would just check downloads and see what the most popular song is and use that as an analog for whether or not it's a good song.
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Search engines just check authority under the assumption that better content gets better backlinks.
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And remember, authority comes from backlinks. And because of that, it literally has nothing to do with how good the content actually is. It has to do with how much authority it has. This is why you can manipulate the rankings.
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Okay?
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And by the way, if your goal was to manipulate that program about the good songs, all you'd have to do is, like, download the song a whole bunch of times or something and you could spoof the results. But I'm just saying, if quality of content counted and it doesn't. Oh, my gosh. It doesn't. Stop thinking it does, because it doesn't. The thing nobody can answer is, how would you account for bias? What if you were searching for a thing and, like, you know, you disagreed with the results? Maybe that result you disagree with is actually higher quality content, but you disagree with it. You're gonna get all mad. I'm not gonna use that search engine anymore, guys. It can't work that way. Like, it literally can't. So half of the Internet. Don't quote me on this. I'm just guessing. Let's just say lots. Lots of the Internet is just editorials and opinions anyway.
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Okay?
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So, like, there's no way to compensate for it? I don't know. There's no way to compensate for it. So even. What about a. Well, written article that you disagree with, should that outrank? Do you understand, do you understand why quality content doesn't matter? And you understand why it's not likely that a search engine can understand it? I mean, I'm sure it understands relevancy and, like, what the topic is, but it can't tell the difference between a good article and a bad article. That's literally the reason that backlinks and authority started to matter. That is literally the reason. Because it's not feasible to rank websites based on the quality of their content. Alright, I don't know how else to say it. And I wish, I wish, I wish that content quality was a ranking factor. I actually do for a couple reasons. One, it'd make the Internet a much better place. Imagine. I want you to imagine that you could actually search for something and get good quality results that weren't trying to sell you nonsense that weren't written by scammers. And I'm not even talking about SEO here. I'm talking about literally any industry. It's got those liars in it, right? That are good at manipulating the search engines, but trying to sell you some garbage. I'm not going to name anybody, but I'm sure you can think of examples of that. There have been some very famous examples of that too, by the way. But imagine that wasn't the case. That would be wonderful. Let me be very careful what I say. I have no problem with authority because authority is a good way to estimate quality.
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Okay?
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But I actually wish that quality of content mattered instead of authority. All right? Let's be very clear about that. That'd be cool. Number two, if quality of content mattered, I would just be a content writer because I'm very, I'm a very good writer. Like, let's, let's, let's be, let's be, let's be clear here. I'm a pretty good writer. Sometimes I'm kind of like short on Reddit, but I'm sure some of you guys have read some of my crazy long posts where I describe everything in super amounts of detail and they're helpful and awesome and useful. And I'm not bragging. And I'm telling you, I'm a pretty good writer, okay? And if that was all that was needed to rank, I would not need to buy expired domains and sell backlinks and do all this other SEO stuff. I would literally just write good content and it would rank. But SEO doesn't work that way. So I'm just. Guys, I don't know how to explain it every time you explain to somebody that content is not a ranking fact, like two more liars appear and they're like, we sell good content and you don't need backlinks. Unsurprisingly, none of those people have ever shown evidence ever of a website ranking without backlinks. I even have a public challenge to the world to show an example of a website with medium to difficult competition that ranks without backlinks. And unsurprisingly, I have seen zero examples of it. All of the people that claim they create really good content ranked without backlinks disappear when I ask them to show an example of it. They probably disappear to try and like scam some other dude who doesn't listen to grumpy SEO guy. But like, surprisingly, they never post an example. So. And when I say surprisingly, I'm kidding. It's not surprising because that's not how SEO works. So look, the other argument is like, it's like, well, grumpy SEO Guy. And by the way, before I give this argument, this is actually a valid argument. This is actually a valid argument, so it doesn't really bother me. Look, people are grumpy SEO Guy. Google says that There are over 200 ranking factors and you're saying all we need is authority. Well, I'm not saying all you need is authority. In fact, I have clearly stated and publicly stated that there are only four things that you need to rank. And I have an entire episode about this. It's episode 51, which is called the four things you need to rank. Let me tell you what they are really fast. One, no penalties. Number two, content quality doesn't matter. It just has to be there. Number three, authority. Number four, relevancy. That is all you need to rank. Yes, there are 200. Fact, I think, I think it's 200. It's like over 200. I'm not sure we'll say 200. Yes, there's 200. But those four things that I just mentioned are like 99% of the game. You can probably forget the other 1% and be just fine. Like, it's like one of those things where something is like really detailed, but in order to be knowledgeable at the thing, you don't have to know everything. You just have to know like a couple things. Right? Does that, does that, does that make sense? Quality of content is not a ranking factor. And the only people who say it is can't even explain. Okay, let me. Let's here, I'm just gonna talk about how awesome I am for a Second, do you know what makes this podcast awesome? It's not that I give you great advice. I mean, it is. But that I explain how and why it's the case, okay? Like, none of the content is king. People can explain why or how content could even be king. Like, obviously, quality of content, like, has zero importance in ranking. But, like, but they can't. They can't explain it. If anything, you'll get some example, like, well, search engines love good quality content, which doesn't explain how or why. It's just. It's just a thing. It doesn't. It doesn't explain anything. It's like if I said authority matters, and then you said, why does authority matter? And I said, because search engines love authority. Doesn't explain anything. That doesn't make any sense. Nobody can understand why content could be king because, A, those people are all liars that don't actually understand it, B, because it's not, and C, search engine algorithms don't even work that way. So I don't know, guys. Keep writing really good content. Well, I shouldn't say that because, like, you should write good content, all right? The Internet needs more good content. Okay, but, like, don't believe anybody that tells you that that's a ranking factor, because it's not. And you've heard all my rants before, so I'm just gonna stop right now. Anyway, yeah, I don't know what else to tell you. I hope this makes sense. If you need a refresher on why quality of content is not king, just think about how you would write a script that would determine what songs are. It could not listen to the songs and tell you it's a good song or not, but it could approximate that data by looking at purchases and downloads, because the assumption is that better songs get more purchases and more downloads. Just like ranking, okay? Where better websites and better content tend to get better backlinks and pay attention. I said better backlinks. I didn't say more backlinks. Okay, I'm not even gonna get into that. Yes, I am. Because people love to say grumpy ass yoga. You said it's all about the number of backlinks. I have not said that. And I would ask you to point out a place either online or in my podcast, where I have said that, because that's not a thing that I have said. I do not say. It's about number of backlinks. In fact, I specifically have an episode called why you shouldn't focus on number of backlinks, and that's episod 68 okay, and I told you to ignore the number of backlinks. When you're doing your SEO research again, you should definitely look at referring domains, but you can ignore number of backlinks because it's not. It doesn't. You can give yourself a million backlinks, and it won't help you at all. Therefore, number of backlinks makes little difference. Anyway, I don't know what else to say. I hope. I really hope you understand. I mean, I'm sure it's one thing to say, oh, content's not a ranking factor, but. But I was really hoping to bring you to a point where you understand why it's not a ranking factor. Because then, like, you won't ever be fooled again. Like, you might. Because otherwise, if I'm just like, oh, do it. Look, everyone in the Internet, or that's not true. Every SEO person is like, do this, do that, do it this way, do it that way. I get a lot of questions from people that are like, grumpy SEO guy, this other SEO person said I should do this. What do you think about that? I'm like. I'm like, I don't know, man. I'm like, does what they say make sense, like, or does it just sound like a thing? They're saying to try and sell you something, and then that's usually the answer, but, like, I don't know. I try to explain it so you actually understand it. But I don't know, man. People are still gonna be like, hey, grumpy SEO guy, I know you said it's all about backlinks, but this other SEO consultant said that you need to write really good, quality content, because search engines love really good content. Seriously think I even have an episode about that? It's episode 71. It's called SEO Contradictions, Clarification, and Critical Thinking. Like, ask yourself. Whenever anyone tells you anything, be like, wait a minute, are they just saying a thing? Or could this actually be the case? Anyway, that's it for this episode. I think I might need to make a part two, because I feel like people are gonna have questions on this one. But in the meantime, we're gonna be talking about some other stuff that I think you're going to really find to be pretty cool. So I'll talk to you later. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe, and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit, or you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder, and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks, and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast, because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com grumpy SEO guy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about should you build backlinks to your homepage or to inner.