I had a thought earlier today, funnily enough whist interviewing copywriters, which led me to think: how important is the quality of writing as a ranking factor following the Panda update?
Obviously the Panda update has had a negative impact to websites which have low-quality content – but, from the other way around, how has this impacted high-quality content? Forgetting completely about links for now and assuming all things are equal, does higher quality written content now have more of a positive impact to search rankings?
Well I thought I’d do a few tests with Google’s reading level search filter to compare the differences between how content ranks which is either basic, intermediate or advanced.
How is the reading-level split between Google SERPs?
I wanted to get an idea about how the reading levels of content is spread between content which ranks on the first page of Google. Does content have to be well-written, or is the fact that it’s unique sufficient enough? Here’s an example query, with the reading levels highlighted in red – please note, not all listings are classified with reading levels.
So what can we read into this (no pun intended!)? Well, looking at these results, it’s interesting to see that no advanced content ranks at all for this query, despite the split between indexed content being very evenly spread across the three categories. In fact I didn’t find a single “advanced” piece of content listed in Google’s top 100 results at all!
Obviously the Panda update has had a negative impact to websites which have low-quality content – but, from the other way around, how has this impacted high-quality content? Forgetting completely about links for now and assuming all things are equal, does higher quality written content now have more of a positive impact to search rankings?
Well I thought I’d do a few tests with Google’s reading level search filter to compare the differences between how content ranks which is either basic, intermediate or advanced.
How is the reading-level split between Google SERPs?
I wanted to get an idea about how the reading levels of content is spread between content which ranks on the first page of Google. Does content have to be well-written, or is the fact that it’s unique sufficient enough? Here’s an example query, with the reading levels highlighted in red – please note, not all listings are classified with reading levels.
So what can we read into this (no pun intended!)? Well, looking at these results, it’s interesting to see that no advanced content ranks at all for this query, despite the split between indexed content being very evenly spread across the three categories. In fact I didn’t find a single “advanced” piece of content listed in Google’s top 100 results at all!
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