Google Says Fluff Content Makes It Hard For Search Engines To Understand

Google’s John Mueller the other day said on Twitter the example given to him was “less about duplicate content, and more about fluff.” He said when it comes to fluff content, it makes “it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say.”

The truth is, it seems like not only does Google crawl and index content fluff, but the search engine seems to prefer to rank content with a lot of fluff.

As you can imagine, that got some funny responses – because you and I know, Google prefers to rank content that is fluffier, even though its featured snippets just get to the point.

Let me share the context:

yes! this. almost every SEO audit I see that was previously done for a company is calling out random sentences or paragraphs and warning of “duplicate content penalties”

It’s sad.

Advertisement

— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) January 7, 2022

And yet individual cases exist where duplicate content does harm sites. Thinning it out, consolidating and similar actions have been proven to significantly boost crawl efficiency, indexing volume, and traffic on sites I’ve audited where it was a problem.

— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) January 7, 2022

Here is John’s statement on fluff content to the last post Alan made:

But that’s less about duplicate content, and more about fluff. If you make it hard for search engines to figure out what you’re trying to say, it’s no wonder they don’t recommend your pages for that.

— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022

Now, I love Ryan’s response:

pic.twitter.com/BSlMP82rpx

— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 7, 2022

Advertisement

It is pretty true, not just with recipe content – although, it is the most obvious with recipe content that Google ranks in search.

It is a topic I covered before around word count and quality where I said I hate it “when someone adds a huge amount of fluff to their content – be it written or spoken – in order to fill space. Say what you need to say and get on with it. People have limited time on this planet, one thing we cannot do it give back time lost. So keep things short, to the point.”

There should be something about getting to your point, in your content, in the least amount of words, so that your users can convert faster or get what they need in a more efficient manner.

But until Google stops rewarding fluff – we will continue to produce fluff.

Forum discussion at Twitter.