Will Content Be King Again?

In recent months, I have become really disillusioned by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines out there for their inability to show useful content at the top. The good thing about having SEO professionals at hand is that you can get your good content to rank higher on major search engines. The bad thing is that you can use these guys to get your crappy content to the top. Think about it. You have taken time to write a piece about history of research and the best researchers in the world, and a guy gets ranked higher than you by writing crappy content that is optimized for the engines.

I am willing to concede that it’s very difficult to get ranked for general terms such as “research” but it’s not impossible, and I have seen way too many low quality sites ranked on various engines in the past few months. I have no doubt that search engines are trying their best to bring the best quality content to the front, but at the end of the day, any algorithm can be gamed.

A year ago, I talked about how getting searchers involved can help Google improve the quality of its SERPs. Google has finally taken steps towards adding the human factor to its ranking factors. I firmly believe that involving searchers is one way forward. Will there folks who will try create automated systems to manipulate the results? I am sure there will be, but content will be king again in the next few years. Only this time, it will be good content reigning supreme and not the crappy content we have all come to see in the past few years.