Google’s John Mueller cautioned publishers and SEOs about filler content, which is generally created with the apparent goal of reaching a word-count threshold without concern for the user experience. Although recipe sites are the cause of this warning, this is the kind of thing that all SEOs and publishers should be concerned about.
Probable Origin Of Filler Content
What Mueller warned about, filler content, probably has origins in the idea that “content is king” which resulted in the SEO practice that values creating content similar to what Google is already ranking except doing it ten times better so that it towers over the competition (10x and skyscraper content strategies).
John Mueller Warns About Filler Content
Mueller’s observations about filler content were in the context of an overview of recent changes in the Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG), a book that Google created to bring more objective standards to how third party raters rate search results that are being tested.
Mueller said that filler content is low quality content that’s designed to make a page longer. Speaking informally and loosely, he said that filler content is problematic because users can find it “annoying.”
This is, according to my notes, what he said:
“Recently, quality rater guidelines, there are few things that I think are interesting for some sites that we have mentioned in the quality rater guidelines now which weren’t in there before.
And so this is the kind of thing which I think is important for sites to realize. On the one hand we’ve written about filler content, which is the kind of fluff that some websites put on their pages to make the pages longer. And sometimes they have good reasons to make the pages longer.
But for us this is sometimes problematic and users sometimes find it annoying. So we have that mentioned in the quality rater guidelines.”
Filler Content Is A Poor User Experience
What Mueller is referring to is the new section 5.2.2 of the QRG which lays out how to objectively judge whether a page has filler content. Filler content previously was nestled within section 5.2 but it’s now broken out into its own section. The main takeaway is that filler content is a user experience issue.
Here’s what the new section of the QRG says:
“5.2.2 Filler as a Poor User Experience
The main content (MC) of a page should support its purpose. Web site owners and content creators should place the most helpful and essential MC near the top of the page so that visitors can immediately access it.
A high quality page has the most helpful MC placed most prominently. Content that supports the page purpose without directly contributing to the primary goal can be included, but it should be shown lower on the page in a less prominent position. For example, on recipe pages, the recipe itself and important supporting content directly related to the recipe should be prominently displayed near the top of the webpage.
Sometimes, MC includes “filler” – low-effort content that adds little value and doesn’t directly support the purpose of the page. Filler can artificially inflate content, creating a page that appears rich but lacks content website visitors find valuable. Filler can result in a poor experience for people who visit the page, especially if placed prominently ahead of helpful content for the purpose of the page.
Important: Content that supports the page purpose without directly contributing to its primary goal can still be valuable if placed appropriately. Filler refers to low-effort content that occupies valuable and prominent space without providing value or without being helpful or satisfying for the primary purpose of the page.
A Low rating is appropriate if the page
● Contains a large amount of low quality and unhelpful filler, causing a poor experience for people visiting the page
● Contains a large amount visually prominent filler that makes it difficult to find the helpful MC, causing frustration for people visiting the page”
Content Filler – Not Just For Recipe Sites
The new quality rater guideline section about filler content specifically mentions recipe sites, likely because of their notoriously long filler content that’s so bad they have to add a link to skip to the the part that’s useful.
Some SEOs generally dislike change and this will probably make some people angry, but in my opinion, any publisher that feels they need to add a link to “skip to recipe” should probably consider that they’re doing something wrong. As Google says, important supporting content should be up front. If users have to skip the content to get to it then whatever it is that’s being skipped is not useful.
Recipe sites may be the worst offenders for filler content, but that doesn’t mean publishers in other niches can ignore the policy. All SEOs and content creators should recognize that filler content is problematic.
Imitating the top-ranked content is a practice that content publishers need to reconsider. It works against what Google is actually trying to rank and can lead to artificial word count targets instead of focusing on the user’s needs.
