Was just wondering what people's experiences are of this, either as a searcher or as someone intending to rank.
I've seen plenty people complain about long form content ranking for what can be answered in a sentence or two.
Is this the case? Outranking better pages that give the answer more obviously/concisely? Any anecdotes, personal experiences etc.
aristotle
6:27 pm on Aug 6, 2023 (gmt 0)
My guess is that this varies considerably from one particular search term to another. Keep in mind that a page's ranking is determined by a number of different factors such as perceived authority, backlink profile, etc.
Also, some search terms may generally call for a greater depth of content even if the searcher is only looking for one little tidbit of information.
brotherhood of LAN
8:06 pm on Aug 6, 2023 (gmt 0)
Agree, totally depends on the query. If it's what's the time in London, it doesn't matter what 1 million pages say, there's one answer.
I guess what I'm asking about is the questions that are slightly deeper than that, the ones where there's no single answer, subjective things like "what's the best time to travel to london" or "top amiga games" or some such (just random suggestions).
They seem to rank really well in Google, and I've seen a bunch of comments saying there's one paragraph that answers it but it's buried in 2000 words, from the searchers PoV. Maybe the SEO PoV people aren't going to say much about it, but it seems to work in a lot of cases.
Was just interested in anyone willing to say anything about it.
They're probably poor examples, thought from the web dev side it's worth asking who tend to be heavy searchers also.
brotherhood of LAN
8:55 pm on Aug 6, 2023 (gmt 0)
Actually a good example is "top alternative search engines", not that query exactly, but the kind of spider food that gets served up.
On the face of it, the results look OK but given query specific knowledge, they are not.
The content is objectively boilerplate bs a lot of the time, often a copy of a copy of some other content and doesn't really satisfy the query.
In some instances there's a sentence that might, or a smorgasbord of sentences that sort-of do.
The SEO world (in the journalism sense) seem to be utterly clueless of what a search engine is.
Their first result (you.com) wants me to sign in with Google.
2nd result is yep.com, basically ahrefs having an offshoot of their SEO products.
Perhaps SEOs have won the game because it's their verbose content vs the user finding answers/ideas.
3rd one openverse, it's an open source image search.
4th result is Bing!
Going back to Google's results its boilerplate nonsense from result 1 to 10.
tangor
3:32 am on Aug 7, 2023 (gmt 0)
One thing to remember is g is a money machine first, search engine second. If long content can provide more eyeballs you can bet that will be served at every opportunity.
EditorialGuy
4:02 pm on Aug 13, 2023 (gmt 0)
I've seen plenty people complain about long form content ranking for what can be answered in a sentence or two.
I'd take that complaint with a grain of salt.
Sure, a site like yours or mine might be able to answer a query for "Widgetville bus fare" with "$1.25" but why would anyone want to click through from Google for that? Google is going to provide that quick answer on the SERP itself.
Users who click on an organic result are likely to be interested in more details than just the basic single-journey fare. For those searchers, a "long-form" page may be just the ticket.
