Google says Fluff content makes it hard for search engines to understand
Google’s John Mueller said the other day Twitter the example he was given was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff”. He said when it comes to fluffy content, it’s “difficult for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say.”
The truth is that it seems that not only does Google crawl and index content fluff, but the search engine seems to prefer to rank content with a lot of fluff.
As you can imagine, this elicited some funny responses — because you and I know that Google prefers to rank content that’s chewier, even if its featured snippets are straight to the point.
Let me share the context:
Yes! this. almost every SEO audit I see that has been done before for a business calls out random sentences or paragraphs and warns of “duplicate content penalties”
It’s sad.
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) January 7, 2022
And yet, there are individual cases where duplicate content harms sites. Thinning, consolidating, and similar actions have been proven to significantly increase crawl efficiency, indexing volume, and traffic on sites I audited where it was a problem.
— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) January 7, 2022
Here is John’s statement on the fluffy content of Alan’s last message:
But it’s less about duplicate content and more about fluff. If you’re preventing search engines from understanding what you’re trying to say, it’s no wonder they don’t recommend your pages for it.
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022
Now, I love Ryan’s answer:
— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022
That’s true enough, not just with recipe content — although it’s most evident with recipe content that Google ranks in search.
This is a topic I’ve touched on before around word count and quality where I said I hated “when someone adds a huge amount of fluff to their content – whether written or spoken – in order to fill the space. Say what you need to say and Go for it. People have a limited time on this planet, one thing we can’t do is make up wasted time. So be brief, go straight to the point.
There should be something to get to your point, in your content, in minimal words, so your users can convert faster or get what they need more efficiently.
But until Google stops rewarding stuffed animals, we will continue to produce stuffed animals.
Discussion forum on Twitter.
