Content is King – but a Fresh Prince is Better

It is an accepted fact that Google loves fresh content and it is not uncomm

on for websites with lower PageRank to beat their competition based on the quality of content alone. The love affair Google’s has with new content has been attributed to its implementation of LSI. There is no denying that making search engines content centric has advantages. There has also been a fair amount of criticism of Google’s implementation of LSI, but making organic searches content centric has allowed smaller websites to compete with larger websites which was a factor in the decision many years ago. An effective link building campaign can cost thousands of dollars. For a smaller site, there is no way they can compete with an established and resource rich website in terms of link building when it comes down to spending.

To help get a better grasp on why Google loves new content, lets assume a website wyz.com is top ranking for the keyword ‘mobile phones’. Google’s implementation of LSI implies that Google’s crawler will have calculated the keyword density of the keyword ‘mobile phones’ on wyz.com. If the keyword density of the keyword ‘mobile phones’ is 4.5% on xyz.com, that would mean that for a new website to compete with wyz.com, the new website will have to create content that is similar to xyz.com and have a higher keyword density. That may sound easy, but it is already pushing the limits and takes some time and fancy writing to not get labeled as spam.

Although, the exact Google algorithm is unknown we can deduce a few things. For wyz.com to get back its number one ranking, they will have to create new content that will have a higher keyword density. That is a basic. Where people go overboard is that they forget not all changes to content are indexed, cached and reflected overnight. It can take close to a month for Google to recalculate a website’s position based on new content. This sometimes leads webmasters to go into panic mode and overdo everything creating problems down the road.

This is the exact reason why most search engine optimizers prefer waiting for Google to finish its rank calculations before making any changes to their content. Link building and PageRank do affect the ranking of a website, but content is king. It always has been and always will be. As discussed earlier in the article, Google has a completely content centric approach while indexing and caching pages, but ironically even changes in the formatting of content can take time to be reflected. This creates the above state of limbo.

Google’s approach has taken its criticism as it takes a long time to calculate ranking based on content. It is evident from the examples we mentioned that new websites have an even longer waiting period in storefor them which makes it even more difficult. Google takes close to 3 months before calculating a website’s PageRank and ranking it for keywords, and a webmaster only knows if search engine optimization was successful three months after uploading a website. That is a long wait to see if your work is paying any dividends, and in the meantime you simply cannot sit still either. Any additional changes to the website’s content will take yet another month to be reflected.

In short, Google’s approach is here to stay, and even though it takes months before Google indexes and caches content, Google is allowing webmasters to use well written and well directed content to achieve better ranking for keywords. However, it is important to remember that content is just part of the complex rankings system used by Google. The algorithm will be tweaked. Some areas may get a bigger slice of that pie, some smaller. Factors will be added and subtracted, but what will not change is that content is king!