Rich content or text

In the SEO industry, there’s long been a discussion about rich content versus plain text. So what’s actually most important?

Historically, Google has only been able to process text. It would automatically read documents and catalog which words were present. Based on those words (along with a number of other parameters), it would then rank the documents in an index. There’s always been a desire—but not the technical ability—to also catalog images, videos, and audio. That’s now starting to change, and Google has begun to reward those types of content.

So, as a webmaster or blogger, it’s good for your SEO to add images and similar media to your articles. Video clips can give you a slight boost as well. But the question remains: what really matters most?

SEOs—and perhaps digital marketers in general—tend to suffer from shiny object syndrome. They get very excited about the latest trends. Images and video are great, but at the core of the search engine, it’s still all about the text. To this day, Google isn’t particularly good at understanding images or video. It can somewhat recognize visual similarities, but it still can’t truly interpret the content.

Google has improved its ability to compare images, recognize similarities, and so on—but it still doesn’t understand the actual content.

Just take a look at the search results for my name. For the most part, the images are of me—but somehow both Aaron Axelsson and Adolf Hitler have managed to sneak in. The reason is simple: it’s not the content of the image that determines what Google thinks it depicts—it’s the surrounding text. Aaron is often mentioned alongside me, and the Hitler image comes from a video uploaded by Victor Kaugesaar, which I’ve written about on my blog at magnusbråth.se.

Rich content is great

To sum up: rich content is great, and Google does reward pages that offer more than just plain text. But don’t think it can replace text. The written word is still the core of Google’s search engine, and you still need to put just as much effort into your copy as before.