Will Google Go After Fluff Content In Search

The other day I wrote about how Google said fluff content is hard for search engines to understand and thus rank. I explained how Google does rank content that is surrounded by a lot of fluff. But then I heard John Mueller of Google once again talk about content fluff and how you should not add fluff to your content.

John said in this past Friday’s video hangout that you should not add fluff to your content. He defined fluff as copying Wikipedia article content, as one example. Here is what he said, this came at the 57:56 mark in that video:

“What I would not do is just add kind of like fluff to these pages and just like, I don’t know, copy of Wikipedia article about the product category and put that on every page. It should really be something that adds value to to the user. So if they go there they see, well, the generic information is on lots of different sites but this website here has some additional information which helps me as someone who might be interested in this product. So really kind of unique and valuable information, adding that is a great idea. Just filling extra text on a page I would not do that.”

Here is the video embed, you can click play and listen to him say it, it should start at the appropriate point:

I then spotted this thread at Black Hat World asking will Google crack down on ‘fluff’ content?

Maybe, maybe Google will? Maybe Google is catching on and is now warning us to be careful about over doing it with too much fluff in our content? So maybe all those fluffy pieces of content in a year from now will no longer rank well? Personally, I’d love to see that, as I said here and here but I guess time will tell.

Forum discussion at Black Hat World.