Revamp Content Creation with Information Gain

Information gain in content creation refers to the unique insights and new, relevant information that content provides compared to existing sources on the same topic. It's a score that measures how much more a source can contribute to a person's understanding after they have seen other sources on the topic. High information gain scores can lead to higher rankings in search engine results, as they indicate that the content offers something beyond the generic or already widely available information.

To adapt content creation to prioritize information gain, consider the following steps:

• Answer all relevant questions about a topic to ensure comprehensiveness.
• Provide additional insights that are not just new or different, but also relevant and valuable to the reader.
• Ensure the content is designed to satisfy users by being both informative and engaging.
• Move beyond basic keyword research and content briefs to include customer conversations and first-party data.
• Hire subject matter experts to provide authoritative answers to important questions.
• Monitor content engagement with quantitative metrics like scroll depth and time-on-site to validate the effectiveness of the content.

This approach treats content more like a product, focusing on quality and insight rather than just volume.

Google's Helpful Content Update (HCU) and the latest Core Updates have a significant impact on content with low information gain, often referred to as 'samesies content.' These updates judge such content more harshly and can lead to a decrease in site performance in search rankings. Google is becoming more selective about what it indexes and ranks, and content that doesn't contribute anything new or relevant to the conversation can drag down the overall performance of a site in search results.

Information gain may play a role in the evaluation of backlinks by influencing the quality assessment of a link. Google might use information gain scores to determine the quality of a link, suggesting that the relevance and quality of linking documents could impact the information gain score of the linked documents themselves. Therefore, it's important to link to, and seek links from, only relevant, high-quality pages that are the primary source of information or contribute something new to a topic.

Information gain could have an E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) component, where who contributes to a topic might be as important as what they contribute. Google can recognize author names as entities and associate them with specific topics. If an author is known for expertise in a particular area, their contributions to that topic could be deemed more relevant and valuable, potentially influencing the information gain score and the overall quality assessment of the content.