Am I skeptical? Admittedly, it’s easy to be. But pray wonder awhile if indeed this is so. For about a year, as an avid web-watcher,
one would have seen a tremendous growth in writing. A problem of just too many, if you say. This begs the question, ‘Do all
contents make qualified reading?’.If the answer is a firm ‘No’, I feel prudence demands we revisit our skill as content writers and look closely at our ability to improve thereupon. Putting it mildly, it is almost incumbent on us to do so. Lest readers of this article suspect another instance of ‘know-all-arrogance’, let me confirm that I do not intend to cast aspersions. Instead, I just want to let some light enter through the cobwebs of contents mushrooming around us.How it all started – the keyword gameNot long back, search engine optimizers had their eyes riveted on meta-keywords, and every seo expert worth his salt rushed in to stuff keywords there. To be true, this tactic did pay back for a good length of time. Those were days when search engines were supposedly weak in their algorithms, and as a result, websites with overstuffed meta-keywords had a field day.Things were to change soon. If Google was thought to have taken lead to totally wean away from the importance of meta-keywords, others quickly followed suit. This dramatically altered the game. For good.On to incoming linksAt the time when meta-keywords was slowly fading into oblivion, in came the next avatar, namely ‘incoming links’. For all that followed, Google has a fair share to contribute. Why? First, Google declined to crawl a new
website unless it is linked from at least another website which is already in Google’s list.A good logic that. However, it failed to dampen a newbie’s spirit to come into being. Locating a known website, where to link from, became the first step before coming alive. What though did alter the eyeball game was something more that Google announced.Google frankly said incoming links do weigh a lot in its consideration of a webpage’s importance (and ‘popularity’ by corollary). No sooner this became apparent that a no-holds-barred game started. Link farms cropped up in every nook and corner of the web. It was indeed fortuitous that Google’s ‘noble’ intention could give birth to thousands of link-related ventures all over the web, many of them spurious.Links turning sourWhen Google stressed on links, what it had in mind was to help surfers shuffle unhindered between related topics across a wide section of similar web contents. What happened instead in many cases was chaotic intermingling among websites that were as disparate as chalk from cheese. Not that Google cared for them, but the idea persisted that one link too many is a great boon, no matter where it came from.One is tempted to surmise that Google’s algorithm was structured in a way that gave preference to links between related topics, yet not factoring in the possibility of unrestrained quantification. As if that were so, Google started altering the way search results are presented in sporadic spurts. The screening continues and each time this happens, search results assume different hues. It now increasingly appears that building reciprocal links will shortly become passé.Content to rescueThis brings us to links from contents. And why not? Here was where the web started. Content then was more in the shape of quality information. There was a ring of authenticity in what we saw on the net in the sense that people who published pages in those days seldom resorted to misinformation. Once commerce entered the scene, the entire picture transformed and degenerated into what we see today. Perhaps that was inevitable given the fact that no public domain can ever remain free of litter.In a way therefore, the coinage of the term ‘Content is king’ is indicative of returning to roots. Or, is it? Coming back to where I started, one can’t help being suspicious of this new-found love for content. For, if you sniff around, you’ll find there is no dearth of content per se, but rare are those contents that offer you quality information.Overflowing supplyI happen to receive hundreds of articles everyday. Sifting them is tedious and after I devote couple of hours each morning, I am more often than not left utterly disappointed. To be sure, most articles, barring a few, will pass the test so far grammatical perfection is concerned. But only a handful offers new insight or some sense of analytical thinking. If I were to post guest articles in my website (which I don’t for other reasons), I would have had tough time selecting right ones.Why such proliferation of contents? The reason isn’t far to seek. Since content became ‘re-important’, for many websites the game shifted to acquiring large volumes of it, quality being of no concern. If a content is only to fetch links (through author bylines) or to impress search engines, luck may soon run out.The reason is simple. Accumulating quality content is an ongoing effort, not something done off and on. Top information sites like SearchEngineGuide, Travelwriters and others are doing it for years. It thus follows that any effort to attract search engine’s attention, whether by sheer number of keyword-enriched articles or by garnering author back-links, has to be planned for longer term. Ahem!