Google's Matt Cutts always stresses the importance of having great content on a website, and the latest Google Webmaster Help video talks about why content is important – complete with a floating Cutts head that is missing the rest of his body.
Google’s Matt Cutts always stresses the importance of having great content on a website, and the latest Google Webmaster Help video talks about why content is important – complete with a talking Cutts head that is missing the rest of his body.
He called it a public service announcement and said that while the head of a document is important, you also need to pay attention to what is in the body of the document as well. Because great content is a core metric in the Google search algorithm, and sites are getting penalized for thin or duplicate content, it’s worth repeating the message to webmasters.
“Head might have meta description, meta tags, all that sort of stuff. If you want to put stuff in the head, that’s great, make sure it unique, don’t just do duplicate content, but stuff in the body makes a really big difference as well,” Cutts said. “If you don’t have the text, the words that will really match on the page, then it’s going to be hard for us to return that page to users.”
“A lot of people get caught up in description, meta keywords, thinking about all those kinds of things, but don’t just think about the head, think about the body because the body matters as well,” he added.
What makes the video even more amusing is that he makes absolutely no reference to the fact that he is a talking head and that his body is missing – but it does get his point across.
Since Cutts did this video as a PSA, it does also raise the question if the upcoming algo update that he has hinted about will also more heavily stress quality content over thin content than webmasters have seen up until now.