Google Prefers Quality Content over Technical Code

According to John Mueller, Google does not use structured data on your site as a way to assign rank. Structured Data is a type of data that is presented in a way that Google understands that it is a certain type of data. Here's a great article by SEJ about the matter.

The way the data is formatted and tagged tells Google that this data represents a small part of a bigger cogwheel of information.

For example, structured data can be used to set a physical address apart from regular text. You could use structured data to indicate if your product on your ecommerce store has a high rating for example. The rating is a type of data that enhances the information about the product.

Google understands this data very well. You can read more about structured data here. What's important to you as a business owner and marketer is some of the notes I made during a recent Google Webmasters office hours hangout.

John explained that structured data isn't necessarily used for ranking factors right now. You can watch the video here:

Structured data is used to help Google present a more relevant pitch about your page to their visitors. This could increase your click through rate says John in the video.

Apples to apples, structured data is not going to give you higher rank. It's a technical issue that can be easily gamed by spammers so Google doesn't put an emphasis on it as a way to check quality.

Perfect code isn't necessary. You need to focus on content.

To the point that I'm always trying to drive home with business owners and their websites. Get them done, and start putting content out there.

Google doesn't care a whole lot if the webiste isn't perfect. Many developers would have you believe that your website is bad if it doesn't pass all these different validation tests.

Tell them this: Content beats code.

Around time mark 11:01 John Mueller explains how a website may be perfect technically but still be low quality.

Compare that to a small budget site that could have dirty front end code. Google may still want to show that page instead of others. Content and relevancy are important. Google needs to serve high quality search results. Not pristine website code.

After you have been publishing for a year, or hundreds of articles then maybe you can invest some money or time in grouping your data and creating a structured data template. But, content first, oh yeah... and links.