Honestly, just when you think it’s safe to sit back and relax and leave your online marketing efforts on auto, those infernal robots over at Google go and move the goal posts once again.  The fledgling online marketing world and the fledgling online world – it is only just out of short trousers after all – are now facing yet another set of updates, designed to keep them up all night; and not in a good way.  Google’s latest set of updates (likely to be five hundred this year) are all about ‘quality’, or so they say.  So, how do you survive this latest outbreak of “Panda-monium?”

Humans Take Over the World

There are plenty of online marketers and business people who still aren’t convinced that quality content matters; this isn’t really their fault, it’s kind of Google’s.  Early on in the days of the Internet people discovered that you could dazzle those infant robots with words.  The scatter-gun approach worked excellently for a while, with the robots thinking that these random words had some kind of relevance.  They did, I guess, if you were a robot; just not if you were a human (which seven billion of us still are).  So, in a gear shift (one of many) Google and the Gang got a bit more sophisticated; this spawned the linking industry, in which three billion writers set about creating rubbishy content on a massive scale that linked back to your site.  For a while the robots were fooled, though human users remained sceptical.

Crazy Geeks

So, here we are bang up to date in 2012; now Google demand relevant, original content, that ‘adds value’ to its readers’ lives; not asking much there then.  There’s something of a rumour that the Search Engine giant is even using real people (no way, those crazy geeks!) to check content, having worked out that robots are great, but they’re no literary critics.  Plus, sadly, they’re just no match when it comes to making decisions on content!  Many of us could have mentioned this fact twenty years ago but no, they’ve had to learn for themselves, as so many of us do.

Made by Humans, for Humans

So, is it back to the past for Internet marketing?  Possibly; humans = creative; robots = functional.  The two, as yet, don’t mix.  While Google’s’ robots are incredibly sophisticated, the real problem is that they aren’t the ‘end users’ of the search ‘product’.  There are industries in which robots fulfil a buying and selling role, the financial markets being a good (well, maybe not that good) example.  However, the end user in the search market remains defiantly human; as the Internet develops into the “Internet of things” this may well change (although I fear that we’ll all have to get over the early days when our fridges sneakily order cheesy pornographic material) but for now creating content for marketing purposes contains one simple truth; quality sells.  Whether you’re producing your own, or outsourcing your content production, it’s a truth that’s worth bearing in mind for the foreseeable.

Survival Tactics

According to Google’s own guidelines, there’s a simple answer to this; however you’re marketing and wherever you’re posting you’re content it needs to be quality, add value and offer useful information.  It shouldn’t be difficult to achieve, but judging by some of the content still around on the Internet it must be an almost Herculean task for some businesses.  The simplest solution is to hire a pro to produce your content, if you’re not able to do so (or don’t have the time to do so) yourself.  Ultimately it’s no big news that climbing the ranks of the search engines is no use to your business, if the human users can’t understand a word of your content.