Answer Question
Does Content Length Now Trump Backlinks for SEO?
I've heard that Google's algorithm weights content length higher than back-links these days. If this is the case, do you recommend adding content should to our best performing articles (those getting the most organic traffic). I've heard one SEO guru say that he looks at all the pages that outrank his and if there are any that are longer (more words) he makes sure his is the longest. Apparently this works. Community SEO experts, can you please weigh in?
By the way, here is the post I am referring to:
Just hit 1,000 organic search visitors a day on a new project Three months ago I had 60 visitors/day And three months from now I'll have 3,000 visitors/day People think SEO is backlinks & learning complicated technical concepts It's not I spent less than $100 building backlinks And the pinnacle of my technical abilities is FizzBuzz, once, on Code Academy But I published ~500,000 words across ~200 blog posts Because Google's goal is to show users the highest quality, most relevant results, not the results with the most backlinks
Definitely an impressive result but given how fast the goal was accomplished, it makes me wonder if the site mostly gets incidental, low value keywords. For example, "company x support" i.e. it is well known that if you build a high quality page about a large company's support offerings you will get a lot of traffic since only you and the company and maybe a few other bottom feeders will have relevant content :)