Press and media: why you should (also) focus on the quality of your content?

A great deal is written and read about the way Google reads / crawls / indexes all the content available on the web. As a content manager, SEO writer or web marketer, who has never heard of Google’s famous “freshness bonus” — that is, regularly bringing new (and therefore “fresh”) content to your site? But producing content at any cost should not make us forget that good content is quality content, deep content that lets you work on your internal linking in particular! How can you tell? We’re offering you an interview with Alice Roussel, SEO Operation Manager at Oncrawl, who was able to observe on an American press site that the quality and depth of content impacted Google’s crawl (and, by extension, the ranking of that content in the SERP).

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It was the in-depth and investigative news articles that ultimately drew our attention and became the core of our analysis.

Alice Roussel is SEO Operation Manager at OnCrawl and a volunteer (notably for SEO) at Surfrider, an association committed to protecting the oceans. Alice joined OnCrawl after several years in a web agency.

As a reminder, OnCrawl is a SaaS crawler and log analyzer available mainly in Europe and North America, awarded best tool in the US, EU and MENA in 2019. Among other things, Oncrawl provides access to log data from various industries / site types to better understand Google’s crawl patterns.

Can you introduce the client and its SEO challenge?

“This is one of our North American users, in the business press sector.

The press is, of course, a highly competitive sector, home to long-established players as well as newer ones. The context is also unusual: the press as a whole has undergone deep changes in recent years.

These various changes have affected the volume of articles published per day, but also the editorial line: gone are the long articles and investigations, making way for breaking news! The number of journalists, for its part, has tended to drop sharply in recent years across most media outlets. Fewer writers, shorter articles (or less in-depth from an SEO standpoint), and far more news briefs… In the end, the various upheavals experienced by the press in general, and by this newspaper in particular, have had a negative impact on this newspaper’s organic search performance.”

What did you observe using your crawl tool?

“The evolution of the press sector, combined with the evolution of Google’s SERP, has increased the level of competition on event-driven / breaking news. Here, the visibility stakes on a news item are decided to the minute (e.g. transcribing a keynote, a political election, etc.). If Google “crawls” your site less effectively and, above all, less often, the consequences can be very significant!

For us, it was interesting to get an initial idea of the discovery delay between the publication date and time and Google’s first crawl, but also the average delay before getting a first organic visit. For a granular analysis, we wanted to apply our historical segmentation based on the publication date in order to better understand Googlebot’s path (or its crawl pattern). To do so, we first isolated the older articles because they were of no interest for the purposes of the analysis, given their age and, in most cases, the obsolescence of the information.

Our segmentation had a dual purpose: to illustrate publications per day and per month.”

How did you notice that lower-quality content reduced Google’s crawl activity?

“In the end, the first results we discovered led us to rethink our analytical ambitions!

We noticed that more than 80% of Google’s “hits” (a hit = an interaction between Google and the website) per day concerned the older articles.

We quickly understood why the recent articles showed notable performance differences.

Generally speaking, breaking news articles performed well in terms of discovery delay and ranking, whereas in-depth news articles showed weaker performance. Breaking news works mainly because it is a strong signal in this news media sector, but also because it is a very important signal for Google News’s algorithm. It is also strongly correlated with domain authority, since breaking news is akin to reworking dispatches from Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.

So it was the in-depth and investigative news articles that ultimately drew our attention and became the core of our analysis.

As I said earlier, the press has gone through many changes in recent years. It is a sector that is closely tied to advances in artificial intelligence (in terms of automatic text generation — which, without being the only reason of course, has led to the elimination or modification of journalist positions). There are now fewer investigative journalists, and more freelancers and copywriters, for example, on the newspaper’s staff. For the website in question, their editorial line has also changed. The reduction in the newspaper’s headcount led to a change in editorial line, with fewer long, thorough investigative articles split into several parts. The policy of producing articles that are less dense in word count but also more concise in terms of internal linking (because there are fewer parts) had a real impact on the way Google sees, crawls and ultimately indexes the site!

In this diagram taken from our conference slides, you can see on this screen (source: Oncrawl) the number of “hits” per piece of content (the segmentation here is based on the publication date). In blue, the most “hit” articles, which are the oldest, and in red, the most recent ones, which receive fewer hits from Google.

In this specific analysis, we leveraged the flexibility of our tool to first visualize the data from a precise angle (in this case, the publication date) and to make reading log data more accessible so it would be more intelligible. It is sometimes hard for a user to know where to start; it is our role to highlight the metrics that stand out to us.”

To go further on this particular topic, we invite you to watch the webinar given by Semji and Oncrawl: Creating new content or optimizing existing content: which ROI-driven strategy should you choose? (featuring Alice Roussel on the topic we have just covered).

Reminder: Google and “fresh” content, a few concepts to know

Google likes fresh content and regular publishing: it’s the essence of how it works (just like domain authority and linking). For a very long time, SEO talked about the “freshness bonus,” a term that actually covers several realities, some of which are now part of a kind of “SEO mythology”:

– the freshness bonus granted to a newly launched site: this would be a kind of “bonus” granted by Google to a newly launched site to give it a bit more visibility while you don’t yet have many backlinks. In its great mercy, Google would place your site in a good position in the search results. Today, this so-called bonus no longer really makes sense and no longer corresponds to a reality observed by the SEO community.

– the freshness bonus for a page: the same principle but for a newly published page. This principle has endured, particularly when, on June 8, 2010, at the Advanced SMX conference in Seattle, Google — through Matt Cutts (head of Google Webspam until the summer of 2014) — unveiled major changes in the way it crawls pages on the web. These changes would be named Google Caffeine. The goal: to make pages viewable just a few seconds after they were found!

Google Caffeine indexes new pages faster and lets users search for information in real time. As soon as Google discovers a new page, it breaks it down and immediately indexes it in its databases. It then becomes accessible to users’ searches. Later, the bot will come back to the page to perform a more thorough analysis (to analyze inbound links, outbound links and other ranking factors).

When Caffeine launched, Matt Cutts communicated that this new way Google worked made it possible to index 50% more recent results as well as multi-type results: social networks, images, videos, etc. Let those who had a blog in the 2010s cast the first stone if they didn’t run the test when the release of Google Caffeine was announced!

– producing new content added regularly to your site: Google will potentially give importance to your site if you regularly inject fresh content AND if you frequently renew or update your content. Provided, of course, that your site has authority and a powerful domain!

Update frequency is now a criterion to take into account just as much as freshness. In its quest to offer the best possible answer to a user, Google is fond of the perfect content that is most geared toward user intent.

In conclusion, Google appreciates fresh content, certainly, but also content that is high-quality and that most precisely answers users’ problems and questions.

This “freshness bonus” principle long created a kind of content-creation dictatorship, for better, but sometimes for worse… Like a vegetable garden, content needs to be maintained and cultivated!

Discover how Semji fits into your SEO strategy by helping you produce quality content that lets you rank better on Google’s SERP and answer users’ questions.

If you’d like to deepen your knowledge on the subject and evangelize internally about how important it now is to write high-quality, ROI-driven SEO content, please fill out our form below to download our dedicated white paper “How to produce, optimize and measure Google-friendly content?”.