Rewarding High-Quality Content: What Google Looks for in Content

Rewarding High-Quality Content: What Google Looks for in Content

As the world’s most popular search engine, Google is constantly striving to provide users with high-quality and reliable information. One of the key ways it achieves this is through its ranking systems, which aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what Google calls E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

But what exactly does this mean for content creators, and how can they ensure their content meets these standards? In this blog post, we’ll dive into what Google looks for in content and how creators can produce high-quality content, regardless of how it is produced.

Quality Content is Key

At the heart of Google’s approach is a focus on quality content, rather than how it is produced. This approach has helped Google deliver reliable, high-quality results to users for years. Rather than banning all human-generated content in response to concerns about mass-produced content, Google improved its systems to reward quality content.

This approach has been core to Google since its inception, and it continues today. Google’s ranking systems are designed to surface reliable information, and its helpful content system was introduced to ensure that those searching get content created primarily for people, rather than for search ranking purposes.

Automated Content and Spam

Google’s guidance on automated content has been consistent for years. Using automation, including AI, to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of Google’s spam policies.

However, not all use of automation is considered spam. Automation has been used for years to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. AI has the ability to power new levels of expression and creativity and to serve as a critical tool to help people create great content for the web.

Google will continue taking a responsible approach to AI-generated content while maintaining a high bar for information quality and the overall helpfulness of content on Search.

Producing High-Quality Content

Regardless of how content is produced, creators seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content that demonstrates qualities of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

To ensure your content meets these standards, Google recommends evaluating it in terms of who, how, and why it is produced. Who is the content for? How was it produced? Why was it produced? These questions can help creators stay on course with what Google’s systems seek to reward.

Creators can also learn more about E-A-T on Google’s Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page, which provides guidance on producing high-quality content that meets Google’s standards.

In summary, Google’s ranking systems aim to reward high-quality content that demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, regardless of how it is produced. Creators seeking success in Google Search should focus on producing original, people-first content that meets these standards and evaluates their content in terms of who, how, and why it is produced.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content