If you want sales, you need more traffic to your business website.  If you want more traffic, you need more content.

But you’re on a budget, so you compromise and use $5 article services, free content, and other quick and easy tactics because content is content.  Right?

Ch-ch-changes

These strategies use to work, but not anymore.  These days adding low quality content to your website is guaranteed to lower your website traffic and hurt your rankings.

Over the last few years Google has made significant changes to their algorithm that added penalties for low quality content.

What is low quality content?

So, what is low quality content?  Low quality content consists of things like free, poorly written, poorly researched, duplicate, thin, or spun content.  Free content and content from low-cost article writing services always falls into these categories.

• Free content: Content offered freely to use on your website.
• Poorly written content: Content written for content’s sake that is of no real value to website visitors.
• Poorly researched content: Content that contains factual errors or is shallow in substance.
• Duplicate content: Content that can be found elsewhere (including on your own website in some cases).
• Thin content: Content that is of insufficient length to provide value.
• Spun content: Unoriginal content that is a modified version of other content.

As tempting as it is, it turns out that free content isn’t really free–it’ll cost you your website rankings and search traffic.  Learn more about why in our article on how free content hurts your business.

How to know if content is low quality

Whether or not content is high quality is a qualitative measure that’s somewhat subjective and hard to define.

Google put out some quality guidelines to help website owners understand what quality content is.  Here’s an abbreviated list (link to full list below):

• Would you trust the information in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or is it shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant content?
• Does this article have spelling or factual errors?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that interfere with the content?
• Is the article short, unsubstantial, or lacking in helpful specifics?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Find the full Google quality guidelines list here.

Why it makes sense

These guidelines may sound harsh, but they make sense.  With nearly 1 billion websites worldwide, there has to be someone to separate the wheat from the chaff.

We use Google to find information fast.  If Google stops giving us the right information, we’ll stop using it.  It’s in Google’s best interest to give us the right information quickly.

So, if you want to be at the top of the search results, you need to create content that’s worth ranking at the top.  Don’t compromise.

High quality kind of content takes a lot of time to create (which is why it’s so rare), but it’s the only long-term strategy that works.

Learn more about how small business can affordably create high quality content.

As content marketing gains popularity, small businesses are seeing the value of website content to generate traffic and increase sales.

But not all content is good content.  Good content is difficult to consistently produce, so some businesses resort to adding free content to their website.

This is a bad idea.  Free website content is very bad for your business.

If free content is found on your website it could hurt your search engine rankings and lower your website traffic.  This can translate to substantial financial losses and has even forced some companies out of business.

Why free content will hurt your business

Google succeeds by providing the best search results to its users.  If Google stopped providing high quality search results people would start using a different search engine.  Therefore, it’s in Google’s best interest to give high quality search results.

If content is free, it’s likely found on other websites like the place you found it and websites using the same free content.  This is not quality content because it’s duplicate content and is found elsewhere.  If you really want to share it, just link to it, don’t copy it.

Free content is typically of very low quality because nobody gives away their best content for free.  Low quality, poorly written content is of little value to website visitors and provides a bad user experience.

Some businesses try to get around this by making changes and swapping out words.  This is called “spinning” content and it doesn’t work very well because it’s still low quality content.  In fact, the “spun” version of content is often worse than the original (which was probably bad to begin with).

There’s no way around it.  If you use free content on your website you’ll eventually be penalized.

If free content is bad for business, why is it so popular?

In the past it was fairly easy to rank for certain keywords by throwing any kind of content on your website, even free content found on another website.

Over the last few years Google made changes to its algorithm to penalize search results for websites with low quality content like this.  Sites penalized include websites with:

• Low quality content (of little value)
• Duplicate content (found elsewhere)
• Thin content (insufficient length to be of value)

Free content typically falls into two or more these categories.

These low quality penalties even extend to websites using their own content multiple times because this is also considered duplicate content.

Unfortunately, some so-called “SEO experts” haven’t done a very good job at keeping up with these changes and still recommend or offer services with these tactics.  You can also still find plenty of websites recommending these tactics, so beware.

How to win

Remember, Google’s goal is to give high quality search results to users.  If you want to rank in Google, your goal should always be to give value to your website visitors.  Do this by offering high quality content that they can’t find anywhere else.  If you always do this, you have nothing to worry about.  It’s also the best way to protect yourself from future changes in the Google algorithm.

To lean more about how SEO really works, check out our article on the truth about SEO for small businesses.