Twas’ browsing the SERPs recently and reflecting upon a post I ran back when in-depth articles first came out. It’s been about a year and a half since then, and I wanted to do a brief check in on one SERP in particular I’ve been following.
Doing a quick query for “SEO” will return a number of results, and 3 in-depth articles. Expand upon those, and you’ll get 7 more (table).
I took some time last night to skim through these, noted the authors, the domain, the word count and a few other metrics.
Content Appraisal
Overall, I would have to say that these 10 articles are not an accurate representation of the keyword “SEO” or really the SEO industry in general. There have been a ton of excellent posts from small and large blogs this year, with 10s of thousands of views and 1000’s of shares and interactions.
Ok let’s take a look at this post “12 questions to ask before hiring an SEO expert” by Scott Gerber that was featured on Mashable in October of 2013.
It is approximately 1300 words, has 1.6k shares, and a dozen or so comments.
This is actually an “expert roundup” post and I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of any of these SEO’s. Not saying they are no experts, I am sure they are. But is this article really the article that we want representing the word SEO as an in-depth article?
This just doesn’t seem right
Don’t get me wrong, Jennifer Slegg and Jayson Demers are at the top of our industry in terms of SEO bloggers. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about them at all, and I strive to be more like them.
But where are the other big names in SEO “in-depth artciles?” Where is Rand Fishkin? Cyrus Shepard? Jon Cooper? Even Matt Cutts?
Where is Rae Hoffman? Jennifer Lopez or freaking Bill Slawski? Barry Schwartz? Michael Martinez?
Hell, “Matt Cutts” appears in 2 of these titles. One of them referenced “the decay and fall of guest blogging” which in my opinion was the most popular SEO article of 2014. Why wasn’t that article algorithmically chosen to be an in-depth article?
Is it because Google really does favor big brands in the SERPs?
Maybe I don’t know how it works, and I have it all wrong. I realize that the in-depth article algorithm isn’t just a popularity contest, but it just seems as though that these articles are not accurately representing the keyword queried.
I’ve started to delve into some other broad queries such as “crime” and “nutrition” and am seeing similar themes. What are your thoughts?
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