Do you know the expression “from your lips to God’s ears?” It means “I hope God hears what you just said, because I want it to be true.”

I say let’s tell Carol Tice “from your keyboard to God’s eyes” for her Why Content is No Longer King post last week on her Make a Living Writing blog. I hope this is true. She says a pendulum has swung back again, so that it’s quality of content that matters, not quantity.

Carol reminds us there was an ugly trend a couple of years back. She called it “content-stuffing:”

Sites stuffed their pages with junk content — much of it almost unreadable, robot-generated SEO garbage — and were rewarded with better rankings in Google searches, and more traffic and sales.

Lots of bloggers went nuts, throwing up any old error-filled, half-baked, two-paragraph post, just to have a post every day of the week. Having boatloads of content was important!

I think we all saw how that was working. I particularly hated the fly-by-night blogs that would steal content and traffic by just copying stuff and filling it full of useful keywords, mucking things up for those of us who actually wanted useful content. Happily, according to Carol, that fell over its own weight:

Eventually, so many sites did the junk-content thing, website readers got hip to it and stopped visiting these sites. The sites quickly lost their credibility. Rankings for junk-post sites went down.

The days when blogs could be sloppy, half-thought-out pieces written in 10 minutes and still succeed are over.

And it gets better. Carol heralds “the new era” in which (drumroll please) …

Great content is king. That’s right – it’s not about quantity any more. It’s all about quality.

I so hope she’s right.