Quality Trumps Quantity as Content Re-emerges as King

Quality Trumps Quantity as Content Re-emerges as King. SERP ranking signals are increasingly moving from being “quantity” based, i.e., keyword rankings and number of links, toward
being “quality” based. Quality is being determined by a number of factors, including author trust (as evidenced by the expansion of Google’s Rel=Author/AuthorRank program in 2012), as well as content authority, freshness, relevance, and depth.

"Social endorsements are becoming a key influence as search engines look for site content that is important to web visitors as evidenced by likes, tweets, and shares."

As a result, content marketing is becoming an effective SEO strategy, increasingly generating higher search rankings and more organic traffic. White hat links are growing in importance, as both Google and Bing released disavow links tools in 2012, which allow sites to lessen the influence of black hat  or broken site links on SERPs. Even with the disavow tool, Google does not rush to restore a site’s good status, waiting until it re-crawls and re-indexes the URLs being disavowed before it takes positive action. It can be weeks or months between spider visits to deep or low quality pages.


Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are driving SEOs to focus on creating and marketing relevant, unique content that visitors want to read and link to. Google is increasingly considering on-page time as a ranking
factor, viewing the metric as proof of user interest in page content. Adding frequent, fresh content generates additional opportunities to rank well, but only if that content enjoys the necessary search engine authority,
from either direct offsite or internal links.


Social endorsements are becoming a key influence as search engines look for site content that is important to web visitors as evidenced by likes, tweets, and shares. For personalized search results, a strong correlation has emerged between social activity and high rankings, and sites that experience strong social sharing perform better in organic search results.

Sites that people are socially connected to have a great chance of ranking well for those people. As for the use of social signals as a general signal, to boost un-personalized results, the search engines have been cagey about how much impact they have.

However, social is a signal that is being closely watched. 
Many of the enterprise SEO tools profiled in this report offer extensive social signal tracking, measurement, and integration
of results into their analytics and dashboard reports through the following types of capabilities:
• Social signal tracking.  Tracking and measuring social votes (i.e., likes, shares or retweets).
• Social as link building. Generating higher volumes of social activity creates more links.
• Social monitoring. Identifying social trends, and who (i.e., bloggers) or what sites are the key influencers on particular
keywords and topics.
• Social campaign management.  Identifying targets for social media campaigns around high-ranking keywords and
topics