How do the engines evaluate content for quality

How do the engines evaluate content for quality


Below are Google Quality Guidelines which helps understanding how Google evaluates content quality.

Quality Guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energy upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

Basic principles:

  • Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
  • Don’t deceive your users.
  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users?
  • Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
  • Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

 Specific guidelines

Avoid the following techniques:
–   Automatically generated content
–   Participating in link schemes
–   Creating pages with little or no original content
–   Cloaking
–   Suspect redirects
–   Hidden text or links
–   Doorway pages
–   Scraped content
–   Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
–   Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
–   Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
–   Abusing rich snippets markup
–   Sending automated queries to Google

Follow good practices like these:

–   Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears
–   Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site
–   If your site violates one or more of these guidelines, then Google may take manual action against it. Once you have remedied the problem, you can submit your site for reconsideration.

You may notice that there are many guidelines around negative signals, but few around positive signals. There are some tips on how to make your site useful, credible and engaging; however, when it comes to being more valuable or high-quality, Google basically says, “be more valuable or high-quality.” As you begin creating content, make sure your website is:

–   Useful and informative: Include you unique value propositions, the location, hours of operation, contact information, menu and a blog to share upcoming events.

–   Credible: Show your site’s credibility by using original research, citations, links, reviews and testimonials.

–   High-quality: Your site’s content should be unique, specific and high-quality.

–   Engaging: Engage visitors by interacting with them through regular updates, comment boxes or social media widgets. Make sure visitors are not distracted by spelling, stylistic and factual errors. An excessive number of ads can also be distracting for visitors.

Google’s Panda algorithm – Panda algorithmically assessed website quality. The algorithm targeted many signals of low-quality sites, but again didn’t provide much in the way of useful information for positive signals.

Google’s guidance on building high-quality websites – Below are some questions that one could use to assess the “quality” of a page or an article. These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves as we write algorithms that attempt to assess site quality. Think of it as our take at encoding what we think our users want.

•  Would you trust the information presented in this article?
•  Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
•  Does the site have duplicate, overlapping or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
•  Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
•  Does this article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?
•  Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
•  Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research or original analysis?
•  Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
•  How much quality control is done on content?
•  Does the article describe both sides of a story?
•  Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
•  Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
•  Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
•  For a health-related query, would you trust information from this site?
•  Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
•  Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
•  Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?
•  Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend or recommend?
•  Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
•  Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
•  Are the articles short, unsubstantial or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
•  Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
•  Would users complain when they see pages from this site?