Is content length a ranking signal?
Google has stated many, many times content length is not a ranking signal.
Unfortunately, we know from the DOJ antitrust transcripts that sometimes what is said publicly isn’t necessarily completely true.
While I’d say to take this with a grain of salt, I’d also say I’m on team content-length-isn’t-a-ranking-signal. This is reinforced by the “OriginalContentScore” in the leaked API docs.
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How in-depth should my content be?
Your content should absolutely be in-depth.
In that same correlation study, Backlinko found that their subset of analyzed pages had a direct correlation to higher rankings the higher the “content score” from Clearscope.
Clearscope states they determine your content grade by:
“…scrap[ing] the top-ranking content on the search engine results page (SERP) and calculat[ing] the importance of each term by how much the keyword appears in the competitors’ articles.”
It’s important to note that this is almost a self-referential process for defining “good” and “in-depth” within the already existing set of content that ranks – it doesn’t account for the unknown.
My process for understanding content depth looks to reduce that dependency a bit by changing what we review first.
How should I understand content depth?
Content depth is providing all relevant details to fully answer a question while still being clear about the specific answer.
It’s also a prime spot to leverage information gain and provide content that’s a step beyond what’s shared in currently ranking articles – by not starting with what’s published in currently ranking articles in the first place.
I typically follow this process:
Step 1: Speak to my sales and support teams. What questions do customers have about this particular topic or feature when purchasing, onboarding or using it? Am I answering all of those questions in my content?
Step 2: Review the search results for related queries, looking for People Also Ask elements, related searches and rich media or schema-influenced results.
Step 3: Review the SERP and see if there are any gaps in the competitor set, where they are talking about a specific idea or concept and you’ve yet to include that in your outline or content brief from your research in Steps 1 and 2.
Step 4: Determine whether any topics have enough content differences to warrant their own article, creating a hub-and-spoke content model.
Every industry and brand will have its own thresholds for content depth, so I cannot give you a quantitative, specific definition of what constitutes “content depth” in this article.
What if the content is out-of-date or old?
Content decay is real and something you should consider solving, for both search engines (it was identified as part of the document leak in May 2024) and users.
As content becomes more and more out of date, it intrinsically becomes less relevant and no longer actually in-depth or important in a way that’s relevant to customers and searchers today.
Passage ranking
Passage ranking is one Google system that’s worth understanding, at a base level.
Google’s documentation has a single sentence, which describes their passage ranking system as:
“…an AI system we use to identify individual sections or ‘passages’ of a web page to better understand how relevant a page is to a search.”
In some ways, this makes historical questions around content depth and length arbitrary.
If Google can now pull out and understand sections of the articles we’re writing to feed search results, does it matter how much content is in the overall article?
Moving forward with content in an AI-centric world that relies on semantic search, I have a few content touchpoints I come back to:
Work with (and create for) people first: Not only is authorship important, but considering qualitative feedback – and answering that first, will likely serve you well.
Directness over length: Answer the question as succinctly as possible.
Focus on originality and comprehensiveness: Ideally, remove AI from the actual writing process. If there’s no way for you to create content without it at the moment, have it reviewed (and edited, if required) by a human for accuracy, tone and nuance.
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