One of the things that people don’t talk about enough is that Google decides if your content is good enough. One article I read said that up to 16% of content that is useful won’t get indexed by Google, because it doesn’t think people will search for it.
What this means is that you can invest a great deal of time and energy into a piece and it will be ignored. Yet if you don’t invest enough time and energy into a post, it will get ignored as well. Where is the middle ground?
Part of this has to do with what Google thinks is high-quality content. We talked before that Google things that things like long-form content are more high quality. Why am I talking about this now? Using Google Search Console I have requested some of my pages to be indexed and some of them have taken a week to get indexed. It turns out that the rate of indexing is dependent on many things you can control.
It depends on things like the frequency of posting, frequency of updating, duplicate content, number of total posts on site, speed of your hosting company, and so much more. Let’s say you have all of these things. You can still be denied just because Google thinks that what you write no one cares about.
Fascinating isn’t it? Google not only shows us what it thinks we want to see but decides for us the content that is available on the web. Of course, you can use another search engine to find content, but since most use Google if you aren’t in Google you won’t have a critical business success currently. This might rapidly change with AI and the ability for people to demystify the online search process.
At one point most of my content was indexed by Google but then it got deindexed with many other content. Now all of those websites have to spend the time and energy to claw their position back in the ratings. Should one company have that much power? I don’t think so. Imagine going to a library and the librarian saying “We only will let you see the books that we think you want to see.” Google’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil” but it doesn’t seem they are living up to it are they?