Google’s Secret “Content Effort” Score: Here’s What It Looks For

0:00If you've ever wondered if Google looks at how much effort you put into your content, well, this is a write up from Cyrus Shepard, really well known in SEO. He's been on the podcast before. He wrote this article, content effort, the Google ranking feature nobody talks about. I read it, very interesting. So, I'm going to share the most important parts with you and then give some extra information that will help make sense of this. Cyrus writes, "When I worked as a Google quality raider, we were required to evaluate every web page we scored on effort alongside originality, talent, skill, and accuracy." What exactly is

0:36effort, and why is it so important? Google's definition isn't exactly what you think it is. Effort does not equal work. So, before I go deeper, if you don't know, Google has these things called quality raers. These are human contractors who manually review and score search results to help Google figure out how well its algorithms are doing. The feedback these quality raers give is just one signal out of many that influence the changes Google makes to its algorithms. And we see those changes in spam updates, core updates, many updates that Google pushes out every year. Back to Cyrus's article, he says, "It may seem strange for Google to

1:15evaluate pages on subjective factors like effort and talent. How can Google possibly know how much effort you put into a page? In truth, they don't. But they can very easily estimate it. And with a high degree of accuracy based on strict standards and the evidence visible on your page, Google can draw on thousands of humanrated documents, machine learning trained at scale, and now AI to assess the quote unquote quality signals of virtually any web page you publish. And over the past 20 years, they've gotten very, very good at it. SEO tools typically focus on things like keywords and topical relevance. But there's a strong case that subjective

1:55features such as effort are equally and possibly more important in Google's eyes. In the age of loweffort scaled AI content getting algorithmically decimated, understanding high effort is increasingly relevant to brands. This is how Google defines effort in its quality raers guidelines. Effort. Consider the extent to which a human being actively work to create satisfying content. Effort may be direct, such as a person translating a poem from one language to another. Effort may go into designing page functionality or building systems that power a web page, such as the creation of a page that offers machine translation as a service to users. On the other hand, the automatic creation

2:37of thousands of pages by running existing freely available content through existing translation software without any oversight, manual curation, etc. would not be considered to have effort. The Raider guidelines then go on to give exhaustive examples of both high and loweffort web pages. Effort is mentioned over 100 times. Most interestingly, the May 2024 Google API leak exposed two data points that

3:03specifically reference effort scoring. There's content effort, which is an LLM based effort estimation for article pages, and UGC discussion effort score, which is UGC page quality signals. To be fair, we don't know how or even if Google uses these metrics, but it's obvious from documentation, public statements, and data leaks that Google spends a lot of time thinking about

3:27evaluating and scoring content effort. Understanding how Google evaluates effort can help us produce content with a better chance of ranking highly. That I really agree with. This is a cool section. Cyrus says, "Before we understand what effort is, it is important to know what it is not. Effort is not word count. It's not time spent creating a page. It's not human written content is better than AI. The key is this. Effort is not how much work you put into a page. It's more about the evidence of useful work that ends up on the final page. And Cyrus gives five really great examples. So there's curation and editing. Loweffort curation

4:06is just a large collection of chicken recipes scraped from other sites. High effort curation is a collection of chicken recipes personally tested by the author organized by popularity and taste. Then there's lowquality automation versus added value. Cyrus writes highef effort pages typically contain at least some elements that AI or automation can't easily replicate like information from proprietary databases or human evaluation and perspectives or highquality userenerated

4:38content unique images and other media. authentic user reviews. And an example of loweffort automation is 5,000 location pages generated from the same template with city names swapped in. So think you have a page for digital marketing expert in New York, digital marketing expert in Los Angeles, digital marketing expert in Philadelphia. The only thing that's changed is the city names. Everything else on the pages are the same. Those are doorway pages. That goes against Google's guidelines. High effort automation would be automated movie recommendation pages generated with real user reviews from an owned app along with proprietary realtime ticket data. That's a great example. Next, there's recycles information versus

5:21original facts and perspectives. To put it simply, loweffort content uses the same facts and information that can be found elsewhere on the web. It's the type of content most easily reproduced by anyone with access to AI, Google, and Wikipedia. High effort content, on the other hand, contains original facts gained through your own experience and

5:41unique perspective/opinions. Importantly, images and video count as content, too. Recycled images and videos borrowed from other sites and/or stock images and video can be considered loweffort. This applies to images or videos that have been slightly altered. High effort media includes detailed high-quality photography and original video. High-quality photography doesn't guarantee high rankings, but it does show you put the work in. I have an episode about this. Episode 1,56 of this podcast, backlinks aren't enough. How to win competitive SEO. If you are in a competitive niche, one of the best things that you can do is have an image at the top of your page, especially on a

6:22commercial page that explains things so clearly without having text in it, that all you need to do is look at the H1 on the page and then at the image and you just understand what the page is about. You don't even have to read the paragraph text. So, if you are a SAS, for example, and you're targeting the keyword room planner app, then there's an image right next to it that shows exactly how the app works and you can look at this image, understand it immediately, and then click the use now button without having to read any other text cuz you just understand this is how

6:53this works. That would be a custom image, too. Cyrus gives an example of loweffort information. A page titled 10 best protein powders describes 10 popular powders without any original research or testing. High effort information. A similar page titled 10 best protein powders we've tested describes the user's experience, testing methods, experiment results, opinions, and richly detailed photos of each product. I will add you want to give the results upfront before going deep into the testing methods, the users experiences, opinions. You give the answer upfront. Everything else is extra information and I'll explain why that's so important in a moment. The next one is filler content versus prominent

7:39helpful content. This is about fluff. So loweffort filler is a page titled how to boil an egg. It begins with 600 words about the history and nutritional value of eggs. High effort content is a similar page titled how to boil an egg perfectly every time. It gives important facts up front followed by useful supplementary information such as egg size, altitude adjustments, and yolk firmness, but you still got to say how to boil an egg perfectly right at the beginning. You got to give people what they want. The last thing on this list is shallow discussion versus quality discussion. And this one could help reflect why some threads on Reddit rank

8:19while others don't. Cyrus writes, "For pages like social media posts or forum discussions, the level of participation and depth of conversation is an important part of effort. Contributions from multiple individuals on such pages can add up to a significant amount of total human effort. A loweffort discussion is a Reddit post titled, "Anyone else allergic to butter?" And it gets a single reply with somebody saying, "Yep, me. High effort discussion is a page titled best hiking boots for women which describes features and experiences from wearing each boot along with in-depth perspectives and opinions

8:54which inform the final recommendations. So that one's an actual article but it's giving opinions or judgment based on evidence. Cyrus gives a twominute audit to create higheffort pages. Before I share this audit, we got to go back to this internal Google presentation from 10 years ago that was dug up during Google's antitrust trial. In this presentation, Google admits this is Google's language. We do not understand documents. We fake it. Our ability to understand documents directly is minimal. So, we watch how people react to documents and memorize their responses. Let's start with some background. A billion times a day, people ask us to find documents relevant to a query. What's crazy is that we

9:38don't actually understand documents. Beyond some basic stuff, we hardly look at documents. We look at people. If a document gets a positive reaction, we figure it is good. If the reaction is negative, it is probably bad. Grossly simplified, this is the source of Google's magic. Each searcher benefits from the responses of past users and contributes responses that benefit future users. So, if you search right now, you'll benefit from the billions of

10:05past user reactions we've recorded. Google records these reactions with Chrome and with tons of different pieces of software that they own. Your responses will benefit people who come after you. Search keeps working by induction. In designing user experiences, serving the user is not enough. We have to design interactions that allow us to learn from users because that is how we serve the next person, keep the induction rolling and

10:30sustain the illusion that we understand. So this was in 2016, Google's quality raider program started since at least 2008. So even 8 years after Google's quality raider program, Google is still saying in an internal presentation, we don't understand documents, we look at behavioral signals. This is why giving the searchers what they want upfront before getting into the extra information is so important because if you don't give that information that the searcher is looking for right away, the searcher is just going to go back to the results. And if that happens too many times, it's going to say to Google, "This content isn't very good. Let's

11:08decrease the ranking for this content." And if that happens across your site, now Google's going to think, "Well, this site isn't very good. Let's stop showing this site as often. Let's stop trusting new content on this site." Google search advocate John Mueller recently said our systems can lose faith in websites. That's his language. But Cyrus's 2-minute audit for how to create high effort pages. It's great for actually checking if the content we make is going to throw off the positive user signals Google wants to see. This audit is just five questions. Is the content edited and curated thoughtfully? So, is the content organized around the user's goal

11:47with the most valuable content easy to find? Number two, did you add something unique that doesn't exist elsewhere? First-party information is critical. This can include original data, facts, observations, and even opinions and perspectives. Three, does the content show evidence of work? Explaining your methodology, highquality photos, screenshots, interviews, and observations all provide evidence that you actually have experience. It's like showing a screenshot of your app on a bottom offunnel SAS page. Number four,

12:16does the content go beyond common facts? If someone else could easily reproduce your content simply by researching the internet, it's likely considered loweffort. Like if somebody all all somebody had to do was do a one single Google search off the top of their head and that was enough. Cyrus writes, explain details or edge cases if you

12:35need to dive deeper into subject matter. Number five, does the content provide deep discussion? To be clear, not every web page requires discussion, but for many topics, personal perspectives that explore evidence and offer carefully crafted perspectives can elevate content to quote unquote high effort. I'll also say that not all of these apply to all types of content. You don't necessarily need personal perspectives on a bottom offunnel SEO sales page, but this is still a great checklist for making content which that to quote Google gets a positive reaction cuz that's what

13:10Google says that they measure reactions. The write up for this will be in the description for this episode if you want to hear Cyrus Shepard's first time on the podcast. Episode 87, Link Building 2025, first 10 links, linkable assets, and HCU wins with Cyrus Shepard. He also talks about his time as a Google quality raider in this episode. That was a great episode, Cyrus. I hope you'll come back on for many more. And this is episode 1,195 of the podcast 1,195 days in a row doing this show. If you want to learn how to make those bottom ofunnel SEO landing pages I talked about in this episode,

13:46how to find the keywords where people are searching, looking to become paying customers, users to call you up as a warm lead, how to do link building that gets meaningful links, how to structure your site for these conversion-based SEO landing pages, examples in every niche, stepbystep breakdowns and walkthroughs and guides, how to do an SEO technical audit, so much more. This is my SEO course, Compact Keywords. It's 13 and a half hours long. I spent a year making it and you are going to love it. That's at compactkeywords.com. If you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so

14:22much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.