The ‘Crafted and Curated’ Google Era

Having been an SEO for around 25 years now, I have seen myriad attempts by Google to truly understand the difference between something just ‘thrown up’ onto a website, and content that is truly ‘crafted and curated’.

I think, some 25 years later, Google is finally getting the hang of it, knowing which pages have been lovingly created, versus pages created by SQL queries from data, or a half-assed ‘content job’ from a disinterested staff or digital marketing agency content writer.

I’m not talking about what content is written, but how the page itself has been constructed. How different it is to other pages on the same site, and how much effort has gone into giving the user a great experience.

Now, some of this can still be faked for now. There are plenty of SEOs who know that adding ‘some images’, ‘some videos’, ‘some quotes’, and ‘a table of data’. To some extent, this still works well. Just by the fact of including these features (as long as they are optimised well), the pages that they are on will do so much better than without.

And of course, EAT, and EEAT elements also add to the equation. Other things that I have seen give boosts have been the inclusion of award logos/mentions, and industry body mentions/logos, too. In particular instances, anyway – not saying this works for all.

But the overwhelming change I think between the Google of 1999, and the Google of 2024 is that it can ‘smell’ the difference between content that has been ‘phoned in’, and content that has been lovingly ‘crafted and curated’.

Now, some leading SEO consultants – and large sites (SaaS giants are doing this a lot!) are on to this, and typically, they are squeezing the life out of it. This has happened with every single winning SEO technique since the dawn of time. But now, everyone wins. The client gets great content, the SEO agency gets paid handsomely, and Google has greater content at the top of it’s rankings.

This has not always been the case – even in very recent years. I have no doubt that machine learning has played a huge part in helping Google to decipher at the keyword, sentence, paragraph, page content, page design, and page uniqueness levels.

With machine learning, Google has learned not only what is great content, but what is very poor content, too. And now, a key difference is that Google doesn’t really have to read it to know this. This is because it not only scans text of a page, but scans of the page itself.

I’ll give you an example. Think of a typical half-assed blog post. It’s got maybe 7 paragraphs, ONE external link, and maybe an image.

Google will see this same page structure several million times per day. But what about a blog post with 23 paragraphs, with 18 images, a couple of videos, several links out to sites that are in context to the page content. Google knows that this will probably be worth reading.

I am fully confident that Google traverses such crafted pages more frequently than the page example mentioned above.

An example of such a page is a random blog post that I selected on the Cognism website. (Logistics Marketing for C-suite Decision Makers). It’s neither earth-shattering, nor will it win a Pulitzer prize, but it looks like the writer has given care to the subject matter. There are several on-brand images, and some quotes, as well as clear indication who has written the piece. There are also several links, internal and external.

As an SEO of some experience, I know why they make this content, and I see the benefit it has to Google, as well as the reader. As I mentioned previously, all parties win with such content. The web is a better place for it.

But…there will come a time where Google starts to understand this content being done at scale will make for a poorer web experience. It will undoubtedly be when more SEOs cotton-on to the tactics, and produce poorer versions of what – typically – the large SaaS companies are using as their main organic strategy in 2024.

Google has already made statements about ‘scaled content abuse’, as it should do. Because for every site that produces content that is truly crafted and curated, there will be 30-100 others that try to cut corners. I am seeing this already.

 

I’d argue that 20 pages of lovingly crafted pages will beat 2000 pages of systematically created ‘semi-crafted’ content in the future. Maybe not today, but at some point in the future. And with ever-better machine learning from Google, this will undoubtedly be at much faster rates than Google was able to do things in the past.

Summary

Nothing has changed. Lovingly-crafted content is always suggested. But now, seemingly by the week, Google is getting better at understanding which content is so – BEFORE it even reads it.