Google can find your content and still decide to omit it from search results.
Most of us already understand that low-quality, duplicate content won’t perform well in search. However, a website page or blog post doesn’t have to be overtly “bad” to be left out.
Recently, our content team came across an interesting article concerning instances where website pages were repeatedly marked as “crawled, currently not indexed” in Google Search Console. This means Google found the pages and reviewed the material, and still decided not to include the content in search results (at least for now).
The author analyzed multiple websites and pages, investigating several possibilities for why this happens. While technical issues were occasionally responsible, the author overwhelmingly deemed the content the main culprit: it lacked enough value beyond what was already available online about the same topic.
The content in question wasn’t inaccurate, poorly written or useless; it was competent. Therein lies the problem: competent content isn’t necessarily a good enough reason for Google to include another page on a topic it already has plenty of answers for.
Naturally, as the person behind much of the content created for Parkway’s clients, this stuck with me. The findings from this article appear to strongly suggest that Google is defining “good” or “worthy” content differently than how even the average person probably would.
If the internet is already supersaturated with content and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get found in search, how do I write something for a client that offers more than what’s already out there?
Commodity vs Non-Commodity Content
Google describes content as either “commodity” or “non-commodity,” based on how interchangeable or original it is. The information in an article can be correct, and the writing can be serviceable, but if the content doesn’t contribute a unique perspective, firsthand experience or original analysis, there’s not really a reason for Google to prioritize it over what’s already available. This is especially true if the information already exists ad nauseam.
However, there is one key nuance. Businesses that have already built strong authority and recognition in their industry can sometimes get away with more commodity content because Google already understands that they’re a trusted source. Smaller businesses, newer brands or companies just beginning to invest in content strategy typically don’t have that same advantage.
The article also discusses how Google occasionally includes pages in search results to evaluate how users respond, testing whether one result offers a better experience than an alternative. A page being indexed doesn’t mean it has automatically earned its place, or that it will stay indexed. Rather, Google is still evaluating whether it is actually useful to the people searching.
Creating a simple page that answers a basic query shouldn’t be the goal. The internet already has plenty of information. There’s opportunity in creating something that adds a perspective, experience or insight that someone couldn’t get (or easily find) from just another search result.
Why Marketers Need Your Expertise
If I’m writing about travel, I can research destinations and itineraries, but I haven’t spent years helping people plan trips to these places. I can research the questions (and answers) legal clients are asking, but I’m not an attorney who has worked through hundreds of cases.
Research gives me information, not firsthand experience. And it’s exactly that personal experience that makes content distinctive.
The tricky thing is that experts don’t always recognize how valuable what they know can be. When you work in an industry every day, things that are interesting or useful to someone outside of it might feel obvious to you.
My job is to take the experience our clients have and turn it into something readable, useful and appropriate for the audience. But I can’t manufacture the expertise. It has to come from the people who actually know the subject.
Creating Content Should Be Collaborative
There’s a lot of value in clients taking a collaborative role in their content creation.
As a copywriter, I want to know what matters to you, what you want to be known for, what your customers are asking and what you’re seeing that others aren’t. Ideally, that means the agency brings the strategy, the client helps shape the direction and the copywriter leverages the client’s expertise to write distinctive content. This could happen through a quarterly conversation, a few targeted questions before each piece of content is written or a simple update about what’s happening in the business.
That responsibility goes both ways. We should also be looking for ways to make the finished content more distinctive, whether through original data, stronger examples, visuals or different formats, within our client’s scope and budget.
Now, this isn’t all to say that non-commodity content guarantees better rankings or visibility. There are far too many factors involved in searching for anyone to promise that. However, we can control what we’re putting into our content.
When content is easy to produce, the experience behind a business becomes more valuable, not less. Our job as marketers is to help turn that expertise into something useful for the people who encounter it.
