Google Doesn’t Need More Content. It Needs Better Content.

Every fable has their own version of the moral, and ours is Goldilocks.

Nobody remembers her for ploughing through every bowl of porridge in the house, she is remembered for finding the one that actually worked for her, not for devouring every bowl of porridge.

Content works the same way, it’s quality over quantity, finding the content creation strategy that is “just right”.

Most content strategies don’t choose the “just right” bowl with one blog a month for instance, they tend to go for every bowl available in the three bears’ cottage and post multiple blogs a month.

For many marketing departments, their plans for the kingdom are always the same – more pages, more blogs, more keywords, more shots at ranking without any clear objective. It’s the SEO equivalent of Jack selling the family cow for magic beans and hoping for the best. Sometimes there’s a beanstalk. Mostly there’s just a very confused cow-buyer and a menacing giant of a director asking hard questions in the next kingdom-wide review.

It might have worked when Google’s crawlers were a bit slow on the uptake, easily charmed by a keyword here and a subheading there. They’re not anymore. Helpful content isn’t a once-a-year update you can dodge by cutting down the beanstalk if you’re quick about it, it’s permanently wired into core ranking now. 

Every page in the realm gets judged on whether it’s actually useful, not whether it’s technically present. The curse isn’t tidy, either. A handful of weak pages can drag down an entire domain, so congratulations, the fifty blogs posted in one month didn’t just fail on their own, they formed an unholy alliance and took the rest of the site’s performance and rankings down with them.

A handful of well-researched pieces a quarter, with a clear objective, don’t come with that particular hex. They get read, linked to, and occasionally shared by someone who isn’t being paid to. In fairytale terms, that’s the closest thing to true love this genre gets.

This isn’t a plot twist. Google announced to everyone in the land, back in 2023, that it wants content created for people rather than merely written by people. Then it went further and started rewarding “Experience”, content from someone who’s actually lived through the thing, not just Googled the thing and rearranged what other people have written. 

That’s the part AI can’t fake on its own, no matter how many times you say the magic words and hope that the pumpkin turns into a coach. A blog that reads exactly like the other nine thousand versions of itself is unhelpful because it tells the reader precisely nothing they didn’t already know before they clicked, a pumpkin dressed up as a coach that never actually leaves Cinerella’s driveway.

Unique angles, first-hand testing, an actual wizard of an expert saying an actual thing, that’s not the fairy godmother’s optional extra anymore. It’s the whole spell, wand and all.

Here’s the twist in this particular tale: Google isn’t just deciding what to show now, it’s deciding what to cite, and it only cites things worth citing, which, shockingly, rules out most of the fifty blogs and their entire family tree.

AI-written content isn’t banished from the kingdom on principle. It’s just held to the same standard as everything else, is it accurate, is it current, does it actually add anything to the story. 

Google’s own guidance is blunt about this, automated content that lacks originality or real value gets pushed down in the rankings, while human oversight and genuine insight are treated as essential, not a nice extra. Out of date, generic, scheduled-for-the-sake-of-it blog content simply isn’t “source-worthy”. Not because Google’s short on kingdoms to pull from, but because most of what’s out there isn’t good enough to bother knocking on the door of.

We wouldn’t recommend the fifty-blogs-a-month plan, and at this point neither would Google. Publishing for volume was never a strategy, it was what people did instead of having one, a quick charm cast to buy time before anyone asked harder questions. 

The sites doing well now are the ones creating and building on existing content with actual expertise and unique information, not a monthly quota someone in a castle meeting agreed to hit.

Given the choice, we’d rather help a client put out one new, genuinely useful blog a month than fifty nobody reads. And where the site already has a stack of pages doing nothing, we’d sooner spend a few months consolidating those into something worth ranking than add yet another one to the pile.

Need someone to put a plan together and work their magic on your site’s content? Get in touch with the SQUIDGY team. We aren’t fairy godmothers, but we are a great agency who understands content Google actually cares about.