The issue of just how much blog content to produce, and how good it needs to be, has been discussed for years in blogging circles. Should we focus on the quality of content, or is it about pure quantity of blog posts?

The simple answer is that they both matter, but things have changed big time with recent Google core updates and SEO/content strategy is not as simple as it used to be.

I have always recognized the important of both, but placed a lot of emphasis myself on the quantity of blog posts published, seeing it as getting as many “lines in the water” as possible to draw in traffic.

The recent Google Updates have completely changed this around and sites that have taken a quantity over quality approach to an extreme degree have been badly hit, and sometimes decimated. You can’t just throw up loads of blog posts on a site anymore and expect it to work. Your strategy needs to be more considered and nuanced now.

Following the Google Helpful Content Updates of 2022 and 2023, there’s is definitely more of an emphasis on the quality of your blog content rather than the quantity. Quantity of blog content is important to a degree to demonstrate topical authority, but having large amounts of unhelpful content can now be detrimental to an entire site.

In other words, all successful blogs do need a minimum baseline of content to demonstrate to search engines that: a) their site has a specific focus or topic that it’s about; and b) it covers this topic or sub-topic pretty thoroughly and comprehensively and demonstrate authoritativeness and expertise in that topic. However, just plastering large amounts of content on a blog for the sake of it or to try and “game” topical authority is no longer helpful and in fact is harming sites that do this.

There is lots of nuance to this issue though, so let’s dive into this topic more thoroughly to see what good and bad blog content strategy looks like from 2024 onwards following recent Google updates.

Why The Quantity Of Blog Posts/Content Matters

The quantity of content on a blog does still matter for a number of reasons. It’s now no longer recommended to crudely and narrowly focus only or purely on the amount of blog posts/content on your site.

But you do also need a minimum baseline of content on your website to gain any kind of authority and credibility in Google’s eyes, and to even get the site properly noticed and indexed in the first place.

Especially when starting a new site, it’s important to try and get 30-50 articles published within a reasonable timeframe, keeping up a good publishing rate, just to demonstrate to search engines that “hey, something’s happening in this corner of the internet, take a look”.

It’s not advised to just dribble out a few articles here and there over several months on a new blog. This is the trap some part time bloggers fall into – they may have other jobs and struggle to find the time to fully devote to creating content, so their publishing rate is quite poor. New blogs that take this approach rarely succeed – the content will not take off if there’s not enough of it in the early days to grab the attention of search engines.

As mentioned, you also need a minimum baseline of core content to signal to search engines what your site is about, and demonstrate intimate knowledge of a certain topic or sub topic (expertise/experience/authoritativeness/trustworthiness or EEAT is a huge thing in SEO now). This makes the content more likely to rank versus having only a few articles dotted around here and there, especially if they don’t really fit together logically.

This minimum baseline might vary on the niche, but 50-100 high quality articles clustered around a few topics/sub-topics is a good suggestion to get started with, to signal to search engines what your site is about and you know what you’re talking about. The quality of the content should be the focus all along, but especially when growing the site further and adding more content (it’s not advised to throw up loads of content for the sake of it).

Why The Quality Of Your Blog Posts Also Matters

The quality of blog posts has also always mattered for SEO, in the sense that it tends to be high quality, in depth, more thorough and helpful content that ranks well, especially for competitive keywords.

High quality content generally refers to content which:

• Is well written, useful, helpful and engaging
• Demonstrates clear knowledge, passion and expertise on the subject.
• Covers a topic pretty comprehensively, to the extent a user does not need to read any other articles to get what they need.
• Adds original research or some kind of new information not available in the current search results (information gain).
• Contrasts differing views and perspectives when appropriate
• Demonstrates personal use/experience/first-hand knowledge of the subject matter when relevant.

Your content needs to be good to stand out from the crowd and get to the top half of the first page in SERPs, where it’s going to get traffic.

But it goes deeper than that now. Recent Google updates in 2022 especially have placed an emphasis on topical authority as an important ranking factor for a site’s content.

This involves having so called “clusters” or “silos” of content on very closely related topics and sub-topics, demonstrating intricate knowledge of that particular subject. This contrasts to having loads of content dotted on a site on different topics within a niche, that don’t really fit together (much less desirable for SEO now).

But this has led some bloggers to go completely to the opposite extreme and throw up loads of content on a website clustered around a certain topic just to try and demonstrate “topical authority”, often paying little attention to the quality of this content. In other words, trying to “game” the algorithm like SEO’s always do, but without really thinking or applying common sense.

As we’ve covered in another post, this is topical coverage, but it’s not topical authority unless it’s actually drawing in user engagement. Topical authority is determined by what content users are engaging with, not just what’s been published and is sitting on a website.

Furthermore, we can now see how sites that have taken this approach have been so harmed by recent Google Updates. Google themselves state in their own documentation on “helpful” content that unhelpful content can now harm even your “helpful” content on your site if you have too much of it:

“With the latest (core update), Google has specifically said that now they’re actually placing a qualifier (on a site). Not a manual penalty, but within the algorithm, if it detects unhelpful content on your website according to their definition, it’s going to put a qualifier across your whole website that is now going to drop you in the rankings – site-wide.

And it’s a qualifier that gets worse the more unhelpful content you have on your site”.

Ricky Kesler – Income School

I understand this can be annoying, as Google’s criteria of what’s “helpful” content isn’t what we might think it is. We might have spent several days crafting a brilliant piece of content, but which draws no organic traffic because the niche is so competitive. And yet Google classes it as “unhelpful”, even though by any reasonable human criteria, it is extremely helpful and well put together.

But this is the direction they’ve moved their algorithm in the last few years. The quality of your content now definitely takes precedence over the quantity, once you’ve got a baseline minimum on your blog which demonstrates good authority and expertise on the topic/niche.

What Does a Bad Blog Content Strategy Look? Like (Quantity over Quality)

New we’ve covered the really important aspects of recent Google updates which have changed the picture regarding the quality vs quantity debate for blog content, let’s cover some blog content/SEO strategies which are now likely to NOT be successful for websites any more:

• Thinking you can get away with only publishing 10 or 20 largely unrelated articles on a website (an old fashioned smaller “niche site” is far less likely to work now – still need a good baseline of content.
• Publishing content that’s broadly related to a niche, but without any kind of cohesive strategy to organize content into logical “clusters” or “silos” that topically fit together.
• Going to the other extreme and publishing hundreds or thousands of articles on certain topics to try and demonstrates “topical authority”, without paying any attention to the quality of this content (mass produced content strategy).
• Using AI tools or hired writers with no passion for the topic to mass produce lots of mediocre content.
• Just gathering and regurgitating the same information that’s already in the existing search results for a certain query/topic, without adding anything original (or using AI or hiring writers to do the same)
• More generally, building sites entirely from mass-produced, out-sourced content with no engagement or passion in the topic from the site owner themselves.

All of these strategies have been working less well for several years now, but even more so from 2022/23 onwards.

What Does a Good Blog Content Strategy Look Like? (Quality over Quantity)

Now let’s turn to what a good blog content strategy looks like, given what Google has communicated they want to see from websites going forward:

• New blogs – Aiming for a good baseline of 50-100 articles, publishing within a reasonable time-frame, which are logically grouped into topical clusters and not scattered across loads of sub-topics.
• Focusing on the quality of blog posts, much more than the quantity, especially once you have a baseline of content that demonstrates authority to search engines.
• NOT obsessively fixating on the number of posts on your website (my mistake), perhaps setting yourself a target of published articles you want, while losing focus on the quality of these articles.
• Taking your time to slowly build a site over time rather than rushing to get 500/1000 articles published in a short time. Patiently building topical clusters of quality content and only moving on once a “silo” has been pretty well covered or “boxed off”.
• In summary, not going to extremes, either publishing too little content (unfocused), or too much content (overly aggressive), with a definite quality over quantity and patient approach.

Quality vs Quantity For Blog Content Analyzed (2024 onwards guide)

If you have older sites that have been hit by recent Google updates and you realize you’ve made some mistakes with your content strategy, here are some quick pointers:

• Conduct a thorough audit of your site, identifying those pages which gain little or no impressions or pageviews from search engines.
• Prune any content that’s not getting any user engagement and therefore classed as “unhelpful”, either deleting it, improving it or redirecting it onto another relevant page.
• Going forward, focus on the quality of blog posts on your website, not the quantity.
• Aim to build real topical authority, which means posting content in clusters, but which actually draws traffic and engagement and isn’t just sitting there for the sake of it.

See our full article on recovering from site-wide traffic drops for more on these and other tips. After fixing a site, you may need to wait until the next Google core update to see an improvement.