Depending on your point of view, “in-depth articles” is either Google’s latest addition that will represent a new opportunity for gaining SEO visibility or yet another threat that further crowds out traditional search results. If you’re in the former camp you may find this Q&A I conducted with myself (yes, I know…) of interest.
What are in-depth articles?
A new type of search result that Google is showing for queries where Google believes a deeper, more informational search result is appropriate. You can see them by searching for “Pinterest” (for example) on Google.com, where it’s currently being tested.
I thought in-depth articles was an algorithm...
That’s how it’s been widely reported, and there is of course an algorithm used to rank the in depth articles, but it’s more than that because this algorithm comes with an appreciable update to the search results page, rarely the case with a Google algorithm update.
So are these new results in addition to normal search results?
No, currently they replace the bottom 3 search results, so the opportunity for ranking with normal search results has diminished a bit more.
Crikey – how do I get “in-depth article” ranks then?
Firstly you’ll need to scour your target keywords for terms that either already show in depth articles in Google.com or that you think are likely to in the future. Then the usual SEO factors are still important, in addition to which is the startlingly obvious fact that your articles need to be more detailed, long and, well… in-depth. Making sure they contain plenty of rich content can’t hurt either. Finally, Google’s published a checklist of some basic requirements it expects to find for in-depth articles, including authorship, the logo of your organisation, use of the “article” schema and a couple of other things. Head over to goo.gl/BoVNNT for full details.
Should I bother? I’d like to rank higher than the bottom 3 RESULTS
It’s true that the bottom 3 search results collectively receive less than 0.1% of the traffic of the top 3, but on the other hand they receive twice as much as all of the results ranking on page 2 added together. Based on this you might reasonably conclude that the value of optimising for in-depth articles depends largely on whether you already have page 1 ranks for the informational keywords you’d like to target.
More importantly, look at what happened to the other “universal” result types over time; videos, news, places, images, and so on all started out segregated from other results in one way or another, and are now an integral part of the search results and often rank at the top of page 1. If in-depth articles prove a hit with users there’s every reason to believe they’ll be made more prominent in time.
By Adam Bunn, SEO Director, Greenlight.
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