Content is King
Or is it? This is something you have probably heard time and time again, but is it true?
The answer, of course is Yes. And No. My thinking is that content is definitely King, but a few things have come to my attention lately. One, I wrote recently about my lost hubpage (Smoked Trout Recipes) due to a trailing hyphen in the URL which seems to cause it to disappear to certain search engines. So, how good is that content? King maybe because it was all good original stuff and a great recipe, but doomed to eternal invisibility thanks to a lack of technical skill on my part.
And how many scams, cheats, link farms and goodness knows what other ways are there to bend the rules so that the content becomes nothing more than a bait on the end of a fish hook? A lot. I came across a site recently that I will not put a link to here that sells words. Yes, words. It took me a while to understand what they were doing as it was not immediately obvious to my feeble brain. They sell any word you want and provide a link back to your site using that word as the anchor text. The site in question has no page rank and very little traffic. So who would buy a word? Not me, but I am not quite as ignorant as I was a year ago.
On the other hand, I discovered a new link in to my personal site the other day from Everybody loves Gringo. I had not heard of this site, but he apparently liked one of my posts because it introduced him to story of stuff, which is another website worthy of a visit if you are a little scared about the way our consumer culture is developing. So, in this case, the content WAS King.
How do you feel about all the cheats and scams that over ride the maxim “Content is King?”
Koka | March 25th, 2008 at 9:58 pm #
Content is king. If you have no content then people will not give your site more than a first glance before moving on to another site. Granted there are many sites that stip posts and do other things that bait the reader into digging deeper, these are not sites that are in it for the long term. In order to get readers and have them coming back for more you need to have content.
Matt | March 31st, 2008 at 5:10 am #
It is disheartening that there are still people tricking the search engines for gain. But from what I have learned, it does seem that the search engines are getting smarter all the time, and so these dodgy techniques will become less and less effective. So if you just keep at it writing uinque, quality content you will win in the end.