Indexing / commodity content

Google is now ignoring the vast majority of content online. Let's talk about why this is and how you can make sure your pages don't get ignored.

So it used to be that Google included the majority of content online in their index, meaning when you did a Google search, Google was looking through most of the pages on the internet. And that's because there was a manageable number of pages.

Eventually, that number became unmanageable. And with ChatGPT and other large language models creating content, it just doesn't make sense economically for Google to index every page on the internet.

And Google understands that most of these pages are saying the same thing as another page, and there's no real value in indexing the same information multiple times. This is commonly called commodity content.

It's not adding anything new, and Google doesn't want it bloat their index. So in that case, they attempt to identify the most authoritative source of that information and only index that one...

ides your content is commodity content without even looking at the content. If you go into Google Search Console and you look at your pages report, you might find some of your pages marked as discovered, not indexed.

These are pages that Google didn't even bother to look at. They just found the URL and decided now we don't want this in our index.

There's two main reasons this might happen. The first is that Google determines it's just not the type of page people would want to find in search.

Maybe this is outdated information, you have an old year on the title, or it's like your COVID policy. Or maybe it's like a thank you confirmation page or your privacy policy.

In that case there's really no issue. You're not trying to drive search traffic to those pages.

The other situation is that Google already has content on the topic implied by the URL, and it doesn't see your website as the cop authority on this topic. In that case you gotta honestly ask yourself, do you have the authority to speak on this topic?...

ntent and decide never mind. In this case, it could be an authority issue, or it could be a content issue.

The more authority your website has, the less critical they're gonna be of the content. But let's focus on the content side, since that's the only one you can address immediately.

If Google is crawling your page and determining the content is commodity content, it's likely because it's seen it as generic or thin. Thin just means there's not enough information on the page.

Generic has more to do with the structure of the page than the actual content. Because again, remember, Google's not reading every page and actually understanding the information.

They're using proxies to make your content appear less generic to Google. You want really high facts density.

Make sure you're including a lot of statistics, data points, quotes, charts, tables, bullet points. All of these things are proxies for depth or high effort content.

And you could absolutely use AI to write all this content, but you can't just use ChatGPT out of the box...