@tjrobertson52

Google can't tell if the content on your website is high quality. ChatGPT isn't even trying. I wanna talk about the state of search algorithms today, how it might change in the near future, and what really matters when you're creating content to show up in these algorithms.

So Google is at least attempting to figure out if the content on your website is high quality, but they're not doing that by reading your content. That would be way too expensive. Primary method they use is user behaviour.

Now there's a lot of debate in the SEO community as to what user behaviour Google considers. I think the only example we can confirm is pogo sticking. This is when someone does a search in Google, clicks on your website, and then goes back to the Google search results page and clicks on a different website.

That is a strong negative signal for your content. They might also be using Chrome data to determine if visitors are satisfied with your content. That's up for debate.

But there's no evidence that they're using something like a large language model to actually read the content on your website and determine if it's high quality. Outside of whatever user behaviour data they are using, they're trying to determine if the content is relevant and if you're an authoritative, trustworthy source, large language models like ChatGPT aren't concerning themselves with the quality of your content at all.

They're just using A search tool and their recommendations are based on how prevalent you are in the results of that tool now there are of course other reasons to care about the quality of the content on your website.

Your brand does have a reputation after all and high quality website tends to get shared and linked to more often which are factors for ranking in these algorithms but if your primary goal is to increase the traffic you're getting from Google and ChatGPT it's important that you know where you're gonna have the biggest impact.

First and foremost, you need to be smart about picking which terms you're trying to show up for you Wanna identify terms that people are actually searching for before they buy your product or service where you could be feasibly considered as the best result.

Next, you need to make sure that term is in the URL, slug, meta title and H1 or title of the page but in terms of content quality, the only thing that Google's really trying to measure and can currently measure with any kind of accuracy is how well you satisfy the searcher's intent consider what information this searcher is looking to obtain or what action they want to take after performing this search.

Make sure your page is making it as convenient as possible for that person to get the information or take that action. You want to prevent at all cost the searcher from returning to the search results to look at another page. Now like I said, all this could change in the next few years.

Elon Musk was just on the all in podcast talking about how grok, Twitter X's large language model is going to start reading the top 10 million tweets every day with the goal of eventually reading all 100 million tweets that are posted every single day. Now it's hard to say if it would ever make financial sense for Google to use a large language model to read all the content they currently index. However, if the models continue to get 90% cheaper year over year, eventually it might.

So in short, right now content quality is not a ranking factor, but you should still create high quality content. Your users will appreciate it and maybe someday the algorithm will too.