A while back I was one of those that used to believe that when it came to building links to your site the quality of the content you used was pretty much irrelevant. As long as the content related to your niche topic, had the anchor text that you wanted to use and some related keywords in it then that was good enough, or so I thought. 

This sort of thinking was backed up when the quote from Google’s Matt Cutts was repeated in various forum. He was reported to have said that when working out search engine rankings the Google algorithm paid little or no attention of spelling or grammar.

So it appeared that it was Game, Set and match to the ‘trash linking content’ people.

However when you look at what Matt actually said then I think the picture is not that clear. 

 

 

I think that the real message here is that Google believe that well written content is very important, but that it is not straight forward for the Google spiders to work out what is good and bad grammar given the complexity of language. Reading between the lines though it appears that if Matt could find away to reward good spelling and grammar then he would.

Given the constant improvement and tweaking of the Google Algorithm, and the fact that Google is increasing the number of human reviewers it uses for websites, I think it is important to pay attention to to quality in all your web content.

Trashing content to build links looks like spam. Google hates spam and will ultimately punish it.

 

 

 

Filed under: SEO best practice

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!