Skyscraper Articles and How Google Ruined Niche Search Results

Notice: This article has been archived from worldofmatthew.info. Article has been edited with basic grammar correction.

One of the most annoying things about the Google search engine is that it appears to love serving up stupidly long articles. You may think there is nothing wrong with longer articles (“SEO” pros call them a “skyscraper article”), but in this “short” article we will go over some problems that come with skyscraper articles:

1. Skyscraper articles make extremely difficult if you want to find a specific piece of information. This is because in order to make an article that is longer than about 1832 words, you need to fluff out the content with some almost unrelated commentary about the subject you are discussing or you could just write a list where people have to use the search function (CTRL + F) of their browsers to find what they are looking for.

2. Skyscraper articles suffer from the quantity over quality problem where in order to write nearly 2000 words per article on a near weekly basis, the authors have to rush everything they do, from the research all the way to the writing itself. This leads to content that is thick on words but thin on content.

3. Skyscraper articles make it harder to find information about a niche. Think about it for a minute, if you have someone that is typing some keywords into a long tail keyword finder they can write about 50 words about a niche to include that keyword, this allows them to outrank articles that are actually infinitive about that niche.

4. Bad quality Skyscraper articles will drive people to get their information from the corporatist social media websites rather than normal websites. This does not just harm the lazy article writers, but it also harms other website that are putting out high-quality content.

I know you might think that these generic skyscraper articles are not doing any harm at all as the information is still out there if you look past all the dreadful results Google always returns but in reality, in the drive for Google traffic people will stop writing about more niche subjects like local buildings for example.

I know this article was extremely ranty, but it has been very frustrating to have to spend hours on Google to find information that could have been found within 5 minutes if the search engine did not keep returning unrelated results. I remember before these changes to the Google search algorithm (I am looking at you, Panda), it was easy to find any information you wanted on any, no matter how niche it was.

Published: 11th November 2017