The Long-Term Web: Content That Lasts

The web changes. I've seen it grow and evolve since 1993. Few sites, few pages from those days are still around; fewer still are useful and receive traffic. (A few of mine do.)

In the past few years, as I've succumbed to the passive-income dream instead of just using the web as an innovative medium for sharing knowledge and passions, I've shifted to writing articles on topics that draw web traffic: product reviews and how-tos; keyword-targeted articles and photo-heavy pages. Some of these articles are rich and deep. More of them are utilitarian pieces like cat carrier reviews (I review things I use) or "What keeps visitors on your page." Less significant. More useful. Traffic-driving. Money-earning.

Yet then I think about how few websites and webpages from years past still draw traffic and still hold significance. Which of our articles will matter five years from now? Which publishing platforms will still bring traffic or even exist, as the web and the very devices we access it change profoundly? Do we even care that are articles may not have staying power, if they're earning money right now?

It matters to us, not only in a philosophical sense ("Will anything I'm working on right now matter in the long run?") but in a practical one.

I've been operating on the "brick by brick" paradigm: each page or article I write may not earn much, but over time, they build up a collective foundation of passive income. Yet that doesn't work if individual bricks keep crumbling to dust. It does not work if we write on temporarily popular topics, on things that are drawing lots of traffic only because that's how search engines work right now. It does not work if we write only reviews of current products, news and people whose fad will fade.

There's another challenge to consider, as well.

Search engines are panning for gold. They're looking for the best pages on every topic. Year by year, search engines develop new ways to find and serve up just the content we're looking for, whether or not we knew it was what we wanted.

Meanwhile, huge amounts of content are posted on the web each day. Most of this content is casual, amateur, not based on extensive knowledge and research. However, over time, gold nuggets have emerged from the mud. Fantastic, useful, spot-on content is posted to the web every day on millions of topics. Amazing websites have appeared, even as many more died away. Amazon outlasted Pets.com. Geocities is dead, but Wikipedia thrives. People still refer to Chris Anderson's 2004 Wired article about the long tail.

As time passes, there is more and more good web content. Eventually, people and search engines find it. In the long run, great content rises to the top and sticks around, while the rest of the mud washes away.

This means that the quality of web content improves over time, ever so slowly. It means that the caliber of content in your niche improves, forcing you to raise your standards to compete. I think that quality will trump backlink strategies, longterm, as so-so sites where backlinks reside dry up.

So what does this mean? Am I saying we should stop writing articles that take only a day or an hour to write? Am I rejecting keyword-focused articles that haul in a bushel of search traffic and make solid short-term earnings?

Hardly. Short-term, we are trying to pay the bills, and have to juggle effort with expediency. My point is that we need to set aside time from our "publish or perish" approach to develop well-researched, expert, professionally-designed pages, websites and projects that may hold up long-term. Build that blog. Make that website on a favorite hobby or passion. Make the absolute best site you can on a particular subject or for a particular purpose. It may be slow to monetize now, but it's more liable to include unique, rich content that people really might be visiting and reading five to ten years from now.

There's no shortcuts. We have to put research and effort into that content. We must write better content than most of what's out there, in order for ours to survive. That means writing on things we really know and care about — which are more fun to write about anyway, after all.