Search engines are getting smarter with how they use their limited bandwidth and resources towards an ever inflating volume of pages on the internet. They apply filters, rules and restrictions to their algorithms and indexes that help them maintain a focus on the most important pages.

The impact to website owners is that it continues to become harder for your pages to qualify as high quality in their indexes. Now Google’s high quality index is often called the primary index and not all pages of your site will make their way into this index. One of the two major factors to get a page into the primary index is unique content. The other is spiderability and will be covered in future videos.

You can find what pages of your website are in Google’s primary index by using the handy queries shown on this screen. You can bookmark this page for future reference. For all intensive purposes, the supplementary index noted here houses all of your site’s pages in Google’s index that they deem un-important and therefore, you shouldn’t expect those pages to perform too well in the search engine.

So your goal is to get your pages into Google’s primary index. That means that you want Google to see your content as unique. You get a new shot at doing this every time Google refreshes its index. It does this by following one link to another, one site to the next and then eventually crawling the entire accessible portion of the internet. If it finds your page during this crawl and notes that the body content is quite new or unique, it will be considered as unique content. This will happen even if other pages on the internet have the same content, as long as your page was found first. You obviously don’t need to worry about being seen first if your content is so unique that no other page in the internet has it.

What happens to all the pages that don’t make it into the primary index? Well, they typically all get put into Google’s supplemental index. More recently though, it seems like Google is trying to send a message of clarity: primary pages matter and supplementary pages don’t. How are they saying this? Well, recently Google has allowed people to view and use a sandboxed version of a test algorithm called “Caffeine” – it looks and feel like regular Google so at first, it’s tough to distinguish what differences you are supposed to be seeing and what it happening beyond top ranking pages.

Our Exclusive Concepts team has been identifying several instances where most of duplicate pages that would typically get dumped into the supplemental index are simply being deleted in the “Caffeine sandbox”. I’ve scratched my head about this and considered all the ramifications of this change. Although I could come up with many concerns based on random assumptions, it empirically seems to boil down to a message from Google to site owners: “we’re not going to house your pages that lack unique content any more – either create unique content for a page or it will be disintegrated”

Try saving yourself: Unique Content should start at around 150 words, though shooting for over 400 words is not over-reaching.

It’s tough to do, but with an intense sit-down, you’ll be investing your time and effort into a project that will have long-term benefits.

Start by defining a voice for your site – a voice and a personality that matches the design and overall image that you have for your site. Anticipate how your audience will react to it and create a tone that is appealing to your target base. Now, only write from that perspective.

This will accomplish 3 things: 1. it will be much easier to get started; 2. you’ll be writing about products and concepts in a way that others cannot copy while infusing your value propositions and personality into everything you write about; finally, #3. Google currently notes grammatical and semantic patterns in the content posted on your site. The more cohesion, the more credit you get. Sure, cohesion is probably one of the least important factors in the current algorithm, but the way the search engines are changing – maybe not for long.

Content’s becoming more important than ever – do everything right this time around.

In closing, if you didn’t know – Exclusive Concepts helps its own clients overcome this major step in ranking within Google’s current and future algorithms by offering a robust SEO copywriting service. We follow and go beyond the tips in the 3rd slide in a way that only an experienced group of SEO copywriters could. Let us know if you’d like to hear more about our service by contacting us at ExclusiveConcepts.com.