Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Part II: CONTENT

By John Doherty

Online marketing, and specifically SEO, are nothing without good content. Whether we are talking about on-page content, content meant to be shared via social media, or viral content such as videos, content is the backbone upon which we build rankings and businesses.

History of Content within SEO

When people hear the term “SEO,” they often think first of links. “I just want more links” is what we have been routinely been told by bosses and clients alike. In the early days of SEO, once the Link Graph began to take shape, the more links approach was useful. With some links and a URL, you could rank any page for pretty much any term.

All of this mostly came to an end with the Florida update in November 2003. It was arguably the biggest change to Google's algorithm up to that point. This update marked the beginning of the end for many SEO practices from the nineties, like keyword stuffing, invisible text, and hidden links.

Over the years, the SEO industry has experienced more updates, including Cassandra (hidden text and hidden links were the target), Austin (hidden text again), Mayday (the first thin content update), Panda (the next thin content algorithm, and its 20+ iterations as of September 2012), and Penguin (targeting overly aggressive link building). Through all of this, content on the Internet has continued to improve, especially as richer media has become more indexable and supported by the search engines.

One potentially fundamental change ...