Quality is.....no longer king? Wtf

[Inhibition]

So I'm beginning my journey into a certain sector of the tech niche, and while doing my research I noticed the funniest things.

The sites ranking for the largest money keywords, and I mean HUGE $x,xxx/day keywords are some of the biggest steaming piles of dumps i've ever seen.

I'm sure everyone knows thewirecutter, well all the sites on page 1 are basically a duplicate of that. They got the whole shtick goin
- 5,000 words all jumbled together that no one will ever read
- giant table of 20 different products affiliate linked

For fun I tried reading through "money pages" of these sites and it was basically like this, and i'm not even joking"

"X is an amazing product many people that try x say that x is high quality and great for doing x, now if you ever wanted to know if x is good we got the review for you because x compared to y is awesome so if you wanted to know how good x is than you need this best review for x now what if you wanted to know how x compares to y ... blah blah blah".

Going through a crap load of keywords and all sites basically did the same thing.

I'm starting to see it in other niche's too - 5,000 meaningless words + an affiliate table.

I have a feeling Google is gonna smite these sites down soon

 

[blackwar85]

You can always do a quick Semrush or Ahrefs check to see how long it has been ranking for top keywords or how many links it has, how it ranks, how fast it got its backlinks etc.

There is always something to learn from those "spammy" websites if they rank that high.

 

[jäger]

This is true. I see it in most finance niches all the time, especially for "fast loans" articles, which is ironic in itself, because the kind of people converting for payday loans, are probably not the kind to read a 5k article on the subject. But that's how the game is played - at least currently.

It is, however, an opportunity to do it even better. Google is already telling you it works, so if you actually provide sharable quality, you might even outrank them

 

[Ryuzaki]

I have a feeling Google is gonna smite these sites down soon

They're already trying. We talk about this in the Google Fred thread. I saw some competitors fall for this. It was glorious.

Part of what Fred targeted was sites publishing mainly only "Best ____" and "___ Reviews" types of posts. Other sites that took a hit were ones optimizing for non-commercial keywords with a sales-style post.

I suspect these big sites are getting away with it because of the outsourced human quality raters. I'm sure before they rolled out Fred they fed the algo data from human raters. And these raters are under unbelievable pressure to be fast and accurate. So whereas robots can't understand quality except by the inclusion of tons of types of HTML elements and length, etc.... humans who are forced to work fast are looking for the same signals so they don't get fired.

I wrote specifically about this very thing in the On-Page SEO day of the crash course if you're interested, in passing in the "enhanced content types" part. There's not a lot of detail because there doesn't need to be. It's just as you said. I provided a list of types to use, and there's likely more I missed. But combining them and mixing them in is really all it takes, and I show "proof" right below that section of how good it works.

Mind you I'm never suggesting to publish long but horrible content. Make it good, of course, especially if you're pushing high-priced items.

I'm sure they'll dial up the Fred algo to wipe out more sites, and eventually go granular to the page level, which will take care of the stuff you're talking about. I think the way to avoid it will be with domain-wide metrics being high (trust, authority) and page-level metrics being high (links, social, great user metrics), and also keeping the number of these posts below a certain ratio of the total number of posts on your site.

Heads up to anyone who read this far: Rip these sites info off of Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc., now. So when they tank you can see what they were ranking easily for and go in and snipe those terms...