Is it True That Content is King?

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.
 
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.
 
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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?
 
I'm currently targeting several keywords where my competitors have thousand backlinks (according to market samurai). But when I looked at the top 10 I noticed they all pretty much had no content; the pages were just price lists consisting of product names.

My page has just over 1000 words. So it's going to be interesting to see how it competes with the loads of backlinks, but no content sites. Ill make a post with what I find out.
 
I agree with zebrahat above that this seems to be turning into a discussion of WH SEO. BHW must be turning into WMW. Anyone who thinks that Google has some magic all seeing eye that can determine good or accurate content from bad just needs to spend a day reviewing some current journal papers in machine learning. Determining whether content actually makes sense (let alone whether it is accurate or not) is one of the hardest topics in machine learning and we are a long, long way from being able to do it. Grammatical correctness is easier to compute, but that's also easy to game with a half-decent text generator.

BH SEO is all about using clever automated tactics to fool the SEs into giving you traffic - Panda or no Panda, it's still totally possible. It's as if some posters don't even look at the serps, but would rather just regurgitate the received wisdom from white hat blogs and forums - you can see evidence of not-too-subtle manipulation everywhere.
 
From what I see, it tends that articles with new information or has more facts rank quickly in the serps.
 
content is like toppings on pizza, if the toppings are good, the pizza is good
 
Content is your likability, SEO has nothing to do with it IMO.

I can tell you this, people naturally link to my sites all the time, unfortunately people usually just drop the URL or anchor it like "here" or something like that. More often than anything they just share on Facebook. If I were to count on that my sites would barely see any traffic from SEs.

The truth is that at this point a brand new site with white hat seo will get you nowhere because of the giant authority sites.

harvard.edu has some of the greatest content on the net, barely you see them rank for anything, despite of the fact that their content kills all the wikipedia like sites.
 
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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.

As a practicing WH and BH SEO I do what works and what doesn't gets dismissed by Google. What was discussed was traffic of 150,000 hits per day from crap content.

I have been there and done that, I own a site that has 250,000 indexed pages in Google that has dynamic content and receives no traffic. Those 250,000 indexed pages are a result of over 2 million pages of which are in Google's supplementary index. I can send you proof to this which I am perfectly willing to supply over PM. What proof do you have apart for your assumptions.

it's not as easy as I'm just going to target millions of low competition keywords. If a site is getting 150,000 hits per day then it is because of something else, not because of the crap content that people dismiss.

You may assume that an algorithm has limitations which I agree to a certain extent but that's like saying that you have found a flaw in the stock market which is going to make me billions.
 
Well researched content naturally attract readers.You would build your reputation that way.Forget SERPS as social networking is the key now.
 
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