I have seen lots of sites with little or now content come up in the ranking and even right now for the key words I am chasing there is a new competitor that has no content to speak of and he right below me at #2 and on some keywords #1 I wont post his url here but on Google.ca if type in Calgary web design, Calgary web designer, Calgary website design, you will see the comapny red line. He has 2 pages and almost no content at all , He does however have 2500 links with most being blog comments. Spammy at that. so my point in all of this is CONTENT IS KING has been proved time and time again to be simply not true.
Many "be sporty" myths are just false legends created by the people who make money and want to prevent competition. Solution is to try everything and learn from your own experience. You will see the forums full of white knights preaching "do good" methods while they make money doing just the opposite
content is king - simply fairytalle of google. Google algorithm from begining counting links. Content is king only when not too much other webistes have backlinks with anchor of query. That working long tail and spammers websites which use a lot of keywords from long tail.
I think content is king can be interpreted as the content being of a good quality in this case. If the content is not relevant to the search term then the rankings will not be there. So the content has to include the keywords. With regards to the amount of content.......thats open to debate. Regards Chris
Good content - is king! Good content will attract natural backlinks in many cases - this saves you time, effort, and frustration. Good content will naturally talk about the subject and other relevant subject without being forced. This will help your rankings for both the main keyword and long tail. Good content will attract return visitors. Regardless of how well it works directly with Google traffic, you want to get a return userbase as quick as possible. If you are just after a MFA site then your business model will be totally different. This doesn't mean it is the best way to do things.
It could be also that his/her URL is old (10 or so years) and with older domains you move up in the searches simply because the Google's algorithm is designed that way (as I read this somewhere).
I have few domains without content, which I am not use now, there some backlinks and there better ranking in google from others with content. But... as wrote @Herron - Good content will attract return visitors and natural backlinks. In summary, good ranking I can to do without good content, by linking from many many website's ( difrent IP C class ), connected to one system. Just few clicks and whole linking strategy as created by system. As seo specialist not always have possibility to manage contents, but always can manage backlinks from my system. There only one destination - top ranking, for this pay my clients. For example: how you imagine make good ranking for online shop where thousands of things and each have same description like at hundred other online shops ?
Content is one major factor. In the ideal world, content rules.. That is why Google has been tweaking its algorithm to make sure content is King. There sure are exception in the real world. You are picking a field "web design" that happens to be well contested by Internet savvy folks. Those links from comments most likely are from bots. It is a matter of time that Google will find a way filtering them out. Not a good way to stay for the long haul If you keep adding good content to your site.. you shall be rewarded.. that I am pretty sure about..
Content is king is NOT entirely bullshit.....Try SEOing a rubbish website to the top and see how long it stays there. Not talking about those "micro niches" but major ones, those that get a lot of eyeballs each day. I say not entirely....because it is true, Google is still extremely reliant on links. Technology is not at the stage where it can discern between a sub-par website and a good one. That is why, Google is quite justified in "spying" on user browsing habits. That's the only way it can determine or form a picture of what makes a website, "quality" or rubbish. And there's many a rubbish or sub-par website at no 1 in Google right now, no doubt about it....
That's not for the long term Check wikipedia, they only focus on content and they have tons of keyword listed at #1
The problem is, content may be great, and you get natural backlinks from it, BUT first you need to rank high enough for anyone searching to find your site in the first place. I spent ages with my dictionary not getting anything at all from google despite having over 1000 pages because I wasn't updating it every day. They google did an algorithm tweak and the traffic is up fivefold from 3 months ago. One day google will work out how to ignore all those spammy backlinks and there'll be actual decent websites at the top. One can only hope ...
Content is important but without backlinks it will not be found as site will not show well in the serps.
Good, relevant content for the searcher is what Google wants to have on their first page of search results. Good and relevant does not always have to mean lost of content, quality is not the same like quantity. Bad, irrelevant spammy content might appear occasional on the first page, but will never stay there for long. Just remember the (in)famous black laptop site ;-) SY
Matte, check also please how many backlinks they have. Wikipedia is example of perfect seo ( content + backlinks + seo ). Can somebody explain me where is border between good content and spammy website ? In my job, i'm browsing tons of websites, comparing many factors and in my opinion very hard to say where is border. In summary - as I am said in other post, content is king there, where not too much backlinks with keywords related to query. Where mayor keywords, there with good content you have no chance to be in first 100 or 200 results. Try for example "online dating" - then you will understand how far is true of "content is King", also at many major websites which are in first 10 in google, not to much content, so...
Search the term "Click here" on Google (without quotes) and check out the number one result... Not only does it have nothing to do with "click here", it has "very" little content, and doesn't contain the phrase "Click here" anywhere in the source code. Having said all that. I think anyone who's in it for the long term, must provide great content and/or, a useful service. Its in Google's best interest to return good quality sites in the results. There's no doubt you can SEO your way to the top with mediocre/crap content, but keeping it there for the long term, may prove to be more trouble than its worth. Cheers James
Content (might be) King = When you actually do something about it. In other words, if you publish a high quality content, but you have no visitors to read it then that content becomes what you call BS. The idea of "Content Is King" comes purely from the fact that Good Content is a Good Linkbait, if people like the content you have published they might link to it as reference, quote a part of your content and link to it again, share it with friends, bookmark it etc etc. But if you really thought that just by publishing a good content you would get top rankings (unless the website has a decent authority) without any inbound links to that page then you have been fooling your self. Hope it helps.
Long term, content is king. Why as ezine articles so successful? Why does a billion dollar company like Associated Content by content if they could just copy it?