Importance of Content
Submitted by smile66603 on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 14:43.
I just finished watching the Black Ink Project webinar on Building a Bulletproof website and had a question about content.
Jeremy mentions he had read a blog posting about the mini site being dead, which I agree, it's important to have more than the "required pages", but I was wondering about the placement of the content. I would think you would want to keep your landing page clean, so the call to action is clear to the user. If you have a website that has 5 articles, is it ok to have a landing page that has pretty much no content and then a link to the 5 articles, or does Google want to see some substantial content on the landing page?
If you have product reviews, wouldn’t you want to have them on a different page with a link that says product reviews?
James
Google wants you to have
Google wants you to have value-added (unique) content on your landing page and throughout your website. You don't have to put all of your site's content on your landing page, linking to it is acceptable.
The important thing to keep in mind is that Google wants you to offer the customer something they can't find on the merchant's site. If you do a thin "reseller-style" landing page expect to get smacked. If you do a thick (unique-looking) site with good content your chances of getting penalized by Google are significantly less.
It's a balancing act... Creating a landing page that is optimized for merchant click-throughs and Google quality score is not an easy task. To make matters worse, Google's definition of "value-add" is often gray and inconsistent. I can show you dozens of examples where thin affiliates are flying under the radar - which leads me to believe that the human variable in quality score plays a huge role in each smackdown.
Yeah, I was reading your
Yeah, I was reading your blog posting about one of your campaigns that had been declined after human review and then you resubmitted it and it was approved. I wish Google would come up with a way to stop things like this from happening, but as soon as you add the human element, the chance of a perfect system is gone.