Google: Content Written By Tapping Into Popular Searches Is Likely Not People-First Content

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, commented about a popular tactic content marketers use before writing content – using trending keyword tools to find topics that are trending or popular now. Sullivan wrote “Content with the primary purpose of tapping into popular searches is probably not really people-first and wouldn’t be recommended for long-term success.”

Danny was responding to a question asked by Irakli Zviadadze on Twitter, where he said you should “curate Reddit answers and create an article based on what you find.”

He was questioned if this would work and responded, “But looking at Google’s stance on AI (paraphrasing but “quality content is what matters, however it’s made”), I think if the post is well structured, UX-friendly, and provides a lot of value for the reader – it should be good to go. Curated posts have been around for a while now (“top 10 x according to… etc”), but we’ll just have to see how things change.”

Here are those tweets with the example:

I feel like this might backfire quickly. Do you think this trick will be around in 2 years?

— anstring (@anstring) July 31, 2023

Here is how Danny Sullivan responded:

Our “stance” on content is to make it for people-first:https://t.co/NaRQqb1SQx

Content with the primary purpose of tapping into popular searches is probably not really people-first and wouldn’t be recommended for long-term success:https://t.co/b1MYLCMGC9

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 31, 2023

You can read into this, I did my best with the headline of this post but it was really hard to get into a headline. So feel free to offer alternatives…

Forum discussion at Twitter.