Friday, 20 March 2015 04:29

Marketing Industry News: Google to Start Rewarding Sites with more Factual Content

It’s no secret that the internet is full of misleading information. If you’ve ever tried winning an argument by Googling the right answer on your phone in the midst of a debate,

you know you can still lose the argument even if you find favorable information because everyone knows that: just because it’s on the internet, doesn’t make it true.

This all may be changing soon, at least with Google. According to an announcement released by Google last month, they are working on a new search engine algorithm change that will rank pages based on factual accuracy rather than popularity. Sites/pages with less falsified information will be considered more worthy.

But how you say? The basic idea is that Google will compare page content against a database of factually accurate, archived information known as Knowledge Vault, which gathers information from such resources as the CIA, Factbook, and Freebase. Additionally, part of the next algorithm will be processing the validity of backlinks instead of just factoring them in blindly.

Why is Google doing this? Aside from the obvious – helping internet users find better/more useful information (something all search engines should be doing) – the goal is to eliminate content and backlink farms. Producing a ton of content (whether relevant or not) and getting a ton of backlinks to a website has been a practice of “SEO Cheaters” for years. Google seeks to do away with content/backlink farming and other unfair SEO practices – an honorable mission in our opinion.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you own a website/blog that has a lot of content and backlinks, and have relied heavily on those things to help grow your organic search rankings, you may suffer a hit in your organic traffic stats, unless of course you have accurate/factual content and valid backlinks. Going forward it will be more important than ever to fact-check your content before you post it, and generally make your best effort to produce valuable, relevant content. As the old saying goes: “Content is king”, a now more accurate saying would be: “Factual content is king.” And, if your mission to gain rankings has lived mostly in link-building, you better start vetting the sites you’re planning to have link to you.