Last week we covered how Google's John Mueller cautioned about using Google Trends for content ideas. Google's John Mueller also agreed that this can be an issue for Google Search's people also ask (PAA) feature. When Glenn Gabe noted PAA falls into this bucket, John Mueller agreed by saying "Definitely them too."
Glenn Gabe wrote on LinkedIn in reference to the Google Trends warning, "I would add mining PAA to this segment. Don't go overboard there... It's great data, but you don't need to act on every single one."
John responded by adding a comment to his post saying, "Definitely them too." Why can this be an issue?
John explained, "It can be tempting to create a content liability on your website. List of topics, list of headings; just fill it out with words from a copywriter or into a content generator."
John added, "This is not how you add value to the web, and it reflects badly on your site. Adding 100 pages with low value content is not a net positive for a website; it's a net negative. It pulls down the good things a site has done. Imagine you go into a store and they have 100 obviously-cheap, clearly-questionable products for sale, how seriously do you take the 10 products that look ok?"
Of course, many in this business do this and "Sure, sometimes it works for a bit, people can be trusting and might go along with low-effort "work" for a while," John added. "But it's not a way to build a sustainable, stable business," he added.
Again, I have never written a piece of content here based on Google Trends or People Also Ask. The content here is based on what the community is buzzing about, what they should or do care about. I don't throw topics into a tool and then come up with some sort of content list of content that I should be producing based on that tool.
Here are those posts:
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
