I’ll say that I’m not an expert in SEO. But I know that content has a great role in SEO.

My question is: Is it true that the content is KING?

Your ideas, suggestions and tips are highly appreciated.

Thanks All

Yes it is. On AND Off Page.

Well yes and no. Of course you need some kind of content, but don't make the mistake to think content only is enough. The best content is just wasted, if nobody ever sees it because your page is on site 118 in the serps.

Originally Posted by WizGizmo

Yes . . . "Content is King", and "The Money Is In The List"

Cheers! - "Wiz"

So a good list + great email content = $$$$$

From a strict SEO perspective, Content will remain King in your SEO pursuit. Post Panda, you would want to develop articles that readers might wanna share/like or bookmark, and that sort of content is what even search engines like.

Whatever form of marketing you are into, if you need to communicate with your customer, you need intelligent writers to make gullible readers to click on an ad/buy a product etc, and that's where the money lies.

Informative content gets linked to naturally.

Continuously produce high quality informative content and your site would become an authority in it's niche.

Socializing that content would essentially gain you natural links as people often link to high quality informative content.

Imagine if Obama died which only one guy caught it on camera, that guy then published that video on his brand new site. That brand new site is going to gain links from every news site on the internet. that is viral content at 100% now if you could just produce viral content at just 1% you would still earn natural links and Google would still rank you well.

Your concern should be to produce content that blows your competitors content out of the water, eventually you would outrank them.

No content is not king that's complete rubbish, yes you get some hits from freshly written content but back links are the #1 priority without a doubt. do not believe me look at this : add the usual address h t t p w w w to the start of this here google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=search+marketing+con sultant&oq=search+marketing+consultant&aq=f&aqi=g2 g-v7g-b1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=393l4405l0l4805l21l21l0l5l5 l0l260l2567l1.12.3l16l0

then click : danielhalstrom and read the first paragraph and look at the rest of the page.

You definately need regular fresh content, but i think backlinking is just as important too.

Quality backlinks with proper anchor text is king. Quality content will help keep your website from getting penalized with the daily algorithm changes Google loves to do.

Nope, content is not king. It used to be king, before Panda. It's now Emperor.

Content is king!!! keep updating your content, make it interesting to read and you will get natural back links.

Content is Definitely King! My partner and I worked feverishly to to write blog posts, keyword rich, on one of ClickBanks most popular product...with hundreds of thousands of competing pages and we managed to get onto page 2 within 2 months. If we did some back-linking we would have reached page 1...

Originally Posted by WizGizmo

Yes . . . "Content is King", and "The Money Is In The List"

Cheers! - "Wiz"

Thanks buddy...How bout' spin articles?

Originally Posted by blackfairy

Well yes and no. Of course you need some kind of content, but don't make the mistake to think content only is enough. The best content is just wasted, if nobody ever sees it because your page is on site 118 in the serps.

I figured it out...but if you have a good content so natural backlinks occur, right? so, you just need a little off page for that, am i right?

Originally Posted by seoguru13

From a strict SEO perspective, Content will remain King in your SEO pursuit. Post Panda, you would want to develop articles that readers might wanna share/like or bookmark, and that sort of content is what even search engines like.

Continuously produce high quality informative content and your site would become an authority in it's niche.

Socializing that content would essentially gain you natural links as people often link to high quality informative content.

Imagine if Obama died which only one guy caught it on camera, that guy then published that video on his brand new site. That brand new site is going to gain links from every news site on the internet. that is viral content at 100% now if you could just produce viral content at just 1% you would still earn natural links and Google would still rank you well.

Your concern should be to produce content that blows your competitors content out of the water, eventually you would outrank them.

Thanks budz...that was a good thoughts

Originally Posted by chaosicq

No content is not king that's complete rubbish, yes you get some hits from freshly written content but back links are the #1 priority without a doubt. do not believe me look at this : add the usual address h t t p w w w to the start of this here google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=search+marketing+con sultant&oq=search+marketing+consultant&aq=f&aqi=g2 g-v7g-b1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=393l4405l0l4805l21l21l0l5l5 l0l260l2567l1.12.3l16l0

then click : danielhalstrom and read the first paragraph and look at the rest of the page.

I have seen some sites that has only 150 words and all ads and links but they are high in search engine. So, my mind twisted and can't clearly state is content is king or not...I have a few knowledge it but I'm not sure...

Originally Posted by ardvark

You definately need regular fresh content, but i think backlinking is just as important too.

Yeah, reliable backlinking

Originally Posted by thetroglodyte

Quality backlinks with proper anchor text is king. Quality content will help keep your website from getting penalized with the daily algorithm changes Google loves to do.

What is the maximum links you can put inside the content?

Originally Posted by ellelebelle

Content is Definitely King! My partner and I worked feverishly to to write blog posts, keyword rich, on one of ClickBanks most popular product...with hundreds of thousands of competing pages and we managed to get onto page 2 within 2 months. If we did some back-linking we would have reached page 1...

Great, Thanks for that.

I regularly put fresh content on my site and send to article directories and it works.
Some time back I was spinning content and adding that to my site but the site did not do well.
Unless it was me not spinning the content correctly.

Originally Posted by abbyknight24

I regularly put fresh content on my site and send to article directories and it works.
Some time back I was spinning content and adding that to my site but the site did not do well.
Unless it was me not spinning the content correctly.

In what context were you spinning content ?

meaning you were using something to spin the original article OR you actually re-wrote the article your self ?


I just re-wrote two 400 word articles and I think they sound even better, I added my own humor/personality through out some of it to give it that twist. Went to dictionary.com, then went to synonyms for the big words. I am already on page 1 for a couple of my sites. Hopefully me doing this for them will help out.

Whats better, to post these re-wrote articles on my site all at once, or seperate them like every other day ?

OH AND.... Should I also submit these re-wrote articles to directories with a link to my site within? (haven't submitted articles yet still noobtastic over here)

Just to add to this, high quality content is not something that can be purchased for $10 for 500 words.

$10 = 1 hour at minimum wage. Great content requires hours of research and hours of preparation.

You may not like my answer and decide to ignore it, but what i'm saying is how it is.

How much research and preparation do you think went into this page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization probably 100+ hours. If that was paid content that would be $1000+ just for that page.

Spun content is a beginners method that makes it easy for Google to detect that you have a low quality site, therefore you will only ever rank for non competitive terms.

Is it True That you are asking this question

Content is KING in the LONG TERM. All the backlinks may get devaluated one day (of course there will be new one then), but once you invest your time and write a really good content, you made an investment forever.

Yes definitely it is. The value and results of all your efforts online depends upon several aspects. One of these is content. You can possibly get the attention and interest of your visitors and readers if you have quality content to offer. Whatever goals you may have online, content will help you reap success.

Content is only king if you have attacked a competitive niche, therefore, you have to do better than your competitors to rank above them.

This is something i have tried and tested myself over the last twelve months or do. I have a one page blog with a 600 word article sitting nicely at no2 in google for its keyword, took just 30 edu links to get there and has been there since july 2011 with out updating it.

Interestingly, sitting above me at no1 is a forum post on the same subject and keyword as mine from 2004...eight years ago!

So, if you are going after a big niche then fresh content is what you need. If you going after a niche/keyword that has little competition then no content is not king. Tried and tested by me.

Content isn't necessarily king or even queen. I pull 150K+ SE hits per day and 90%+ of my content is auto generated garbage. Content might help you get good backlinks but it's those backlinks that get you the rankings and the traffic. Really all that content is doing is giving you a medium to stuff keywords into the page, so you can hit the keyword density you want and also get more shots at long tail traffic by including related keywords in the page.

Content is more of a necessity in the more competitive serps that have the spam dial cranked right up... But that's not necessarily the easiest, the best or the most profitable way to get traffic.

Search engine are being continuously refined to allow only unique content and my answer is yes. Try adding as many original articles as possible, you will definately see positive results.

Originally Posted by Autumn

Content isn't necessarily king or even queen. I pull 150K+ SE hits per day and 90%+ of my content is auto generated garbage. Content might help you get good backlinks but it's those backlinks that get you the rankings and the traffic. Really all that content is doing is giving you a medium to stuff keywords into the page, so you can hit the keyword density you want and also get more shots at long tail traffic by including related keywords in the page.

Content is more of a necessity in the more competitive serps that have the spam dial cranked right up... But that's not necessarily the easiest, the best or the most profitable way to get traffic.

Hello Autumn,

I think there is something else contributing to your 150k hits per day.

If 90% of your content is auto generated garbage then how is your site generating 150K from the search engines? from your manipulative link building? you must have earned that trust from somewhere especially now Panda has been released. If your content is garbage then how is Panda not penalizing you?

You post is absolutely confusing and I would like some clarification if you wouldn't mind.

Originally Posted by Fathom

Hello Autumn,

I think there is something else contributing to your 150k hits per day.

If 90% of your content is auto generated garbage then how is your site generating 150K from the search engines? from your manipulative link building? you must have earned that trust from somewhere especially now Panda has been released. If your content is garbage then how is Panda not penalizing you?

You post is absolutely confusing and I would like some clarification if you wouldn't mind.

All SEO is is giving the SEs the combination of content and backlinks that they want.

"Good" content from the SE's perspective is content that a) hits all the right textual metrics eg. keyword density and distribution, content length, perhaps sitting within a certain range on readability scores etc. and b) that has a lot of backlinks, and the right kind of backlinks. Remember that the SEs can't actually tell whether your content is "good" as in factually correct or well written (although the human spam reviewers who might see your site as some point can).

So my content is good in that I can get it to hit the text metrics within the certain range that I think is what Google is looking for. And I get lots of (automated) backlinks, and not from the usual places that your typical Scrapebox spammer is getting them from either. But my content is not "good" by the usual sense of the word ie. human readers wouldn't think it was good if they actually read it.

Originally Posted by Autumn

All SEO is is giving the SEs the combination of content and backlinks that they want.

"Good" content from the SE's perspective is content that a) hits all the right textual metrics eg. keyword density and distribution, content length, perhaps sitting within a certain range on readability scores etc. and b) that has a lot of backlinks, and the right kind of backlinks. Remember that the SEs can't actually tell whether your content is "good" as in factually correct or well written (although the human spam reviewers who might see your site as some point can).

So my content is good in that I can get it to hit the text metrics within the certain range that I think is what Google is looking for. And I get lots of (automated) backlinks, and not from the usual places that your typical Scrapebox spammer is getting them from either. But my content is not "good" by the usual sense of the word ie. human readers wouldn't think it was good if they actually read it.

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree because I’m not going to get into a debate with you on this on a public forum.

I hope for your sake that you are employing people in the thousands before Google catches on to you.

My input: Serp Rankings is king. Traffic is king. without traffic then only ghosts reads your content. Your content comes close to king.!!!

i know some people truely believe that content is king so trash away at my content.

Originally Posted by trevorhoang

My input: Serp Rankings is king. Traffic is king. without traffic then only ghosts reads your content. Your content comes close to king.!!!

i know some people truely believe that content is king so trash away at my content.

And how do you get serp rankings and SE traffic?

From my personal prospective and what I have done, I believe content is king along with the right combination of backlinks. Google deindexed a few of my sites because of spammy auto-gen articles

Interesting read, i'll see what everyone else comes up with so I could implement the idea and possibly use it to better rank my sites.

Content is king from my experience. add building quality backlinks to it consistently and we've got a winner.

I lean towards Autumn on this exchange. "Unique content" does not necessarily mean "great" or excellent content, just content that meets the SEO metrics. The almighty Google algo is software, it can only evaluate content in terms of those metrics, not in terms of whether the info is pleasing to a human. So long as a site is serving those metrics and not tripping any other alarms for being 'unusual' (i.e., too high a CTR for Adsense ads on the site), there won't usually be problems from Google about the content.

Unique Content is like a new product in a market which attracts buyer/user/visitor.

Originally Posted by zebrahat

I lean towards Autumn on this exchange. "Unique content" does not necessarily mean "great" or excellent content, just content that meets the SEO metrics. The almighty Google algo is software, it can only evaluate content in terms of those metrics, not in terms of whether the info is pleasing to a human. So long as a site is serving those metrics and not tripping any other alarms for being 'unusual' (i.e., too high a CTR for Adsense ads on the site), there won't usually be problems from Google about the content.

Google's algorithm may only be software but that software has had billions of dollars of investment and constantly being improved by the best engineers around the world.

Google's machine learning algorithms detects unnatural links and devalues them, they also detect duplicate and spun content as well as low quality content. Autumn is claiming to receive 150K visits per day from this kind of content.

Panda detects the average bounce rate, how long someone spends on a page and whether or not that person has moved on to another page on the site as well as other indicators, basically if the user thinks the content is bad Google will know, so Autumn is not only avoiding the search engines but she is avoiding Panda. Why not share this information with your fellow BHW members?

Google also uses trust metrics of an entire website. A site that receives nearly half a million visits a month has to have high trust otherwise Google would not rank them. Highly trusted links are not earned manipulatively and if you did somehow mange to get one of these highly trusted links, you better make sure the majority of your links are natural otherwise Google may devalue it and leave that highly trusted site with less trust itself.

Content is the foundation of any site, if you have bad content then why is Google going to rank your site? we are not in the 1990's Google resolved this problem years ago.

Even if you focus on the lowest competitive keywords Google only has a certain amount of trust for your site, they will simply not rank you at all which would result in no traffic. You may be able to get away with this at first but it does not last.

Black hat SEO is not about creating low quality content and building those easy to get manipulative links anymore, you need to be smarter than that.

Originally Posted by Fathom

And how do you get serp rankings and SE traffic?

Well spun congent is treated as king in the eyes of google. We all know that google loves fresh new relevant content but us blackhatters can trick google into thinking that it is fresh new relevant content. Getting a website to a good rank and gain traffic is still king in my eyes. After the traffic, tons of doors open up for the webmaster.

my arguement still remains: traffic is king

I'm still not convinced personally. I have excellent, high quality content articles on my sites that were 'designed for the user' not the search engines. I paid good $ for these and continue to update them regularly but some of them don't rank well at all due to competitors having more inbound links. It's very annoying when the top 10 is literred with spammy sites, some of which has spun content that doesn't even read well! Anyway, I'm going to continue to ensure the content on my sites is of the hgihest quality as I know in the long run it will pay off and the panda will sink its claws into the poor quality sites sooner or later!

Originally Posted by trevorhoang

Well spun congent is treated as king in the eyes of google. We all know that google loves fresh new relevant content but us blackhatters can trick google into thinking that it is fresh new relevant content. Getting a website to a good rank and gain traffic is still king in my eyes. After the traffic, tons of doors open up for the webmaster.

my arguement still remains: traffic is king

Prove to me that your site with spun content is receiving traffic from the SE's, bet you can't. Prove to me that any site with spun content receives alot of traffic from the SE's.

I know the truth hurts, but we are all on the same side.

Originally Posted by Jinko

I'm still not convinced personally. I have excellent, high quality content articles on my sites that were 'designed for the user' not the search engines. I paid good $ for these and continue to update them regularly but some of them don't rank well at all due to competitors having more inbound links. It's very annoying when the top 10 is literred with spammy sites, some of which has spun content that doesn't even read well! Anyway, I'm going to continue to ensure the content on my sites is of the hgihest quality as I know in the long run it will pay off and the panda will sink its claws into the poor quality sites sooner or later!

What you consider to be high quality may actually not be or you just have not given it enough time to receive those natural links. I advise you to read your competitors content as well as the overall site and ask yourself if your content justifies ranking above them. If your page and site is better than theirs then you just need to give it more time.

To get your content seen by more people try building related social friends and if your content is news worthy submit a paid press release. Another great way to get your content seen is to guest post on related blogs.

Yes every day and any day. You need good content to make user's stick and keep a decent bounce rate.

In my opinion content is still king but backlinks are the queen

you need both.. remember google wants relavant websites for SERPS our goal as SEO / Internet Marketers is to make them that way in googles eyes.

good luck getting ranked for the term "shoes" with just content

Originally Posted by Fathom

Prove to me that your site with spun content is receiving traffic from the SE's, bet you can't. Prove to me that any site with spun content receives alot of traffic from the SE's.

I know the truth hurts, but we are all on the same side.

i actually use a good amount of spun content to build a website. then i outsource the backlinking to increase SERPS. when it is ranked well, depending on the type of website, i would either put in some unique content for the readers or leave it as a micro niche website.

i sense some hostility from you! lol if im mistaken then my apologies but my gameplan works for me . building a website requires CONTENT but im saying that ranking a website doesnt require unique content (hence content is king).

once the traffic comes then I can choose to put in unique content or leave it as micro niche.

btw no one would prove to you what you are asking for proof. this is only my speculation . cheers

Thank you.

Content without the requisite backlinks is just a lonely page. If you build it they don't necessarily come so taking a one dimensional approach to SEO will only get you failure.

Yes, absolutely. I have been to two meetings with Google reps and each one said that each page - each and every page - has to be high quality and bring something useful to the user. Even a few spammy pages in a large site can tank its rankings.

it's just like how the world and people work. But i can only way from my experience that sometimes it's not about who has the biggest amount of unique content, it's about who has the most optimized content and blog. And sometimes you can have the most useful content but if you don't optimize it you can be easily beaten.

Originally Posted by Fathom

Even if you focus on the lowest competitive keywords Google only has a certain amount of trust for your site, they will simply not rank you at all which would result in no traffic. You may be able to get away with this at first but it does not last.

Black hat SEO is not about creating low quality content and building those easy to get manipulative links anymore, you need to be smarter than that.

We are smart enough to know there are limits on what even the most refined software can detect, without human observation. Trust metrics do not measure good or bad to the supernatural extent you have insinuated, they simply do not. If that were the case, badly written pages on big authority sites would deranked or punished to some extent, when in fact that simply doesn't happen.

Also beware of being preoccuppied with 'quality' content to the point where it's no longer BH SEO, but WH SEO being discussed. I see nowhere in your discussion where BH concepts ever enter the equation, such that what the "quality content" mantra ends up being, is an appeal to be more WH. In my book both WH and BH SEO are faulty IM business models, as they revolve around the search engines. More energy should expended on mastering non-SEO based traffic strategies, not deeper chasing of the white rabbit of content.

What we need to be smarter about is avoiding being overly dependent on Google for traffic, hence a de-emphasis on hopping to comply with every algo change would be more helpful. That is a resource and labor-intensive distraction to making bank, whereas pursuing non-SE sources of decent traffic is the way to go for longer term stability of an IM business.

Of course content is king from that point of view, that with crappy content it is very hard to get organic backlinks.

However... without any backlinks your content wont be seen, unless you have really strong profiles in social media.

So it is kinda the chicken and the egg problem - without good content there will be no organic backlinks and without backlinks no one will see your good content.

However, the most important question is: what will matter to search engines in the near future?