This time last year there was no doubt on every good seo work person that providing high quality content on a website would add great value to a website. Is this still true today?

I believe that providing good quality content on a website should be standard regardless of your seo strategy. A website should have information and content that people want to read and will enjoy reading, no question. Doing this 12 months ago would by all accounts have been a key component in any seo strategy, providing new content would keep the search engines hungry for more, open up new opportunities for long tailed keywords and generally help with your overall SERP positions.

It seems to me that the value of updated content has been reduced as of late. Maybe this has been introduced because of the sheer volume of bloggers out there that update their sites with very low quality updates in the hope to get on the good side of Google? Or perhaps bloggers are re-posting existing articles with very little changed from the original therefore reducing the importance of the content?

So if content is no longer key, what is its value?

As mentioned before you should have good quality content no matter what, this should be for the benefit of your readers or customers, not for Google or other search engines. You will still see an increase of traffic but not as high as once realised, plus your primary keywords will move very little (if any) up the SERPS.

What is key then?

Unfortunately in Google I believe that the websites visibility through backlinks still plays a big part of your overall positions for keywords. Even more so now the majority of people have been slapped on the wrist for “buying links” or paying for blog posts. Developing new and effective ways of generating natural links and maintaining and increase of these links should now be a major part of any seo strategy, this is unfortunately easier said than done.