No, despite our insistence that long-form articles will gather more viewers and more support from search engines over the long-term, the fact is that epic cornerstone articles are not inherently better than regular articles. Find out why right here.
You Need to Favor Usefulness Over All Else
A large article of around 10,000 words could be used as a cornerstone article. It could take a prime spot on your website, but despite its fancy promises, Bing, Google, web spiders, and search apps have no reason to prioritise it over your other content.
The only reason we push the strength of 10,000 words article is because when we at SeoExpertDanny.com create a longer article, it is both useful, informative, and usually contains the sort of details that are difficult to find elsewhere on the internet. It isn’t the length of the article that sells it, it is the usefulness of the article. It just so happens that when we create ultra-informative articles, they end up being the size of a small Kindle e-book.
The Press Release Dilemma
We used to spend days at a time trying to convince clients that they didn’t need press releases, even though most other online articles and advisers were telling people that they needed at least 20 guest posts per week, and 5 press releases, and 30 social media mentions and so forth.
Thank goodness those days are over, but there is a risk they will return, especially when it comes to cornerstone articles. People are starting to believe that their website will be more successful if they produce a cornerstone article every week or every fortnight, and it is just not true.
You could fill your website with cornerstone articles, and you could have a website with zero cornerstone articles, and both stand the same chance of being popular.
Just Because it is a Cornerstone Article Doesn’t Make it Special
We come across people who claim that their cornerstone articles are the best performing on their website, and they ask us to write sixty of them to be published over the next month, and we have to reason with them to help them stop the madness.
We dig deeper to find out that the web
master has 50 blog posts, and three cornerstone articles. The webmaster’s blog posts are 300 words each, and the cornerstones are around 5000 words each. Put simply, in this case, the cornerstone articles do better because they are probably far more informative and useful than the 300 words blog posts on the website.
It has nothing to do with the fact they are cornerstone articles. If every blog post was 5000 words long, then not only would the website be more popular, but it would probably contain far more useful information than most other websites in the genre/niche.
Conclusion – Take Our Word for It
Believe us when we say that cornerstone articles are no more SEO friendly than any other long article. If the article is useful, then it will draw more viewers than one an article that is long and useless. It is really that simple.
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