Long Content at All Cost Can Backfire – Why and What Is the Solution

One of the most frequently encountered problems that SEOs and freelancers are facing repeatedly is how to make a service page longer when the service itself is boring, straightforward, vague or some nauseating combination of those elements. Then the average SEO specialist finds comfort in the mantra: “Google loves longer content”. Well, that's not necessarily the case.

While it's clear that on average, long-form content wins engagement, climbs the SERP and triggers sharing, it does not make long-form content attractive. Or from another point of view, if it was true, then it would be like the false notion that books are better when they have lots of pages. Imagine if William Shakespeare only wrote poems about peasants toiling for the Crown, and if he used only the same fifteen or twenty words in every single poem. So what can we add up here? It is clear that:

Longer content doesn't equal great content;
Writing longer content shouldn't be your primary goal;
Longer content is not the one and only factor for higher rankings and more shares;

There are many factors that show the downside of that overall trend. It's the constant rise of abandonment rates, the shrinking attention spans and the modest percentage of people who actually read long content to its end. Furthermore, many of the latter not only skip the end paragraphs – they also scan through the body, without reading every word or sentence.

So what are the characteristics of readable and sharable content:

The right content answers the queries of the visitors and help them complete their goals;
It gives great user experience no matter what is the visitor's choice of browser or device;
Saves time by delivering the sought-after information and experience quickly;
Combines the aforementioned elements better than the competitors;

Now let's see some examples. First, you should create content that helps people and do it efficiently. You should match your content to your audience's needs and your business/personal goals. Hundreds of additional words will not help you reach your goals any more than ten more words. Never write an ultimate guide where a single image could more powerfully convey the same value. Just like actions speak louder than words, a single relevant picture is worth a thousand words.

Next, you should always made a clear distinction between user-friendly, content-friendly and SEO-friendly characteristics. These are three different nuances of your website and if one of those three pillars is crumbling, the end result will never be satisfying;

While content is king, the audience is the queen. And just like the queens from the classic novels, the audience wants the relevant information. And it wants it now. So if you still think that those long and detailed guides are worth more than shorter and smarter pieces of information, which are keyword-rich and have lots of multimedia, please reevaluate your strategy before it's too late.

What to Do with Internal Linking after the April 11th Google Warning

Most of you, as SEOs, face the same challenge over and over again – to consider who we link and what we link from our websites. And this week, Google announced the following: linking to unnatural looking sites or in unnatural patterns will penalize you. It's not something that nobody have  seen coming. Every once in a while  the search engine finds new ways to reduce PR and the overall value of your links for the sake of spam control. But what are the onsite aspects of this latest change and how we can get benefits?

It turns out that internal links will have more power in the future. In other words, Google will reward internal links in a new way. So let's see what are the possible scenarios for now and how you can build up a strategy that will take you ahead of the competition.

The Screaming Frog Strategy

1. Use Screaming Frog and analyze with it the Google Search Console Search Analytics data. If you notice that a page on a deeper level is earning an interesting amount of traffic, you can opt to neutralize some of the level-creating internal links to that page from pages in higher levels. For example, a blog post buried in the archive can have higher traffic because of a new "evergreen posts" blurbs in homepage;
2. Use Screaming Frog by downloading the InLinks report and use it with Fusion Tables in order to visualize what URLs represent the most relevant nodes, hence use those nodes as spots (if justified) for placing those internal links that can help a page you want to be crawled frequently and to earn more Page Authority via link equity redistribution;

The Good Internal Links Will Bring Positive Impact 

So besides checking the traffic changes and redistributing, you can provide navigation, link off to specific pages ans categories – all that for the sake of indexing and crawling. Eventually, it would lead to higher traffic. So what are the first insights after Google's April 11th announcement?

You don't need to think twice about adding another link or reference to a specific category page;
Internal links tend to have the largest impact on already authoritative sites: some high-authority websites already made such redesigns – linking to strong pages in orde4r to get many pages deep in your site structure to get crawled and indexed;
It's prudent to remove manipulative links: a word on a page, on category-level page or blog-level page is a visitor-friendly linking. On the opposite side, links stuffed into footers, in deeply index pages or paginated versions of things will hurt the ranking of your site;
The main principle is to do changes for SEO, which are beneficial to visitors as well. An XML sitemap is an exception, though;
Footer links can be replaced by sidebars and top navigation links. Even in-content links are a better option;
High-authority websites with well-developed footers are an exceptions: it works when non-anchor text links go to all the properties that your site owns and controls;