Google's John Mueller was asked if it matters if your publish content written by outsourced resources versus in-house resources. John said it does not matter, Google does not differentiate between outsourced content versus in-house content. For Google, what matters is if the content is quality, no matter who writes it.
This came up at the 54:47 mark in the last hangout where John was asked "how much does it matter if a publisher is outsourcing content for scalability reasons versus having content created by staff or staff writers?"
John responded "I don't think for the most part that we would differentiate. It's more about the quality of the content overall." He added "So that's something where if you outsource the content and then you get good content back, then you publish that good content. So from from that point of view I wouldn't say that outsource content versus in-house content is kind of different by definition when it comes to the overall quality."
Then Rob asked John how would Google even know if content was outsourced or not? John said "I don't know" and was then cut off, so he didn't really finish that thought.
He then said when it comes to "aggregated content" that is an issue. John said "it would be different if you're aggregating content from other sites. That's something which we could pick up on. But if it's really just someone in-house or someone from an agency writing the content for you. It's the content that you're publishing."
Here is the video embed of this conversation:
Here is how Glenn Gabe put it, with some commentary:
Big if in a lot of cases. Very big if.
— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) April 5, 2022
Fine... it's a deal! But the link is nofollow. Not negotiable!
— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) April 5, 2022
The topic of authors and if Google can recognize the author is an interesting one. Can Google judge if an author is real or not, does your content need to be written by real doctors or does the content need to be written in a way that a doctor would write it. Google has said the author is not a ranking factor before and Google has previously recommended that doctors review your medical content and have an expert write your content. But Google also downplayed renting experts names for this purpose even though Google has said before it tries to recognize the author details.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
