Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Friday, June 10, 2016
Columnist Patrick Stox takes a comprehensive look at what Google might consider to be "quality content" and adds his own thoughts and tips based on his experience in the SEO industry.
Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines
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
- Sneaky 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
Google on how to create valuable content
As you begin creating content, make sure your website is:Useful and informative: If you’re launching a site for a restaurant, you can include the location, hours of operation, contact information, menu and a blog to share upcoming events.More valuable and useful than other sites: If you write about how to train a dog, make sure your article provides more value or a different perspective than the numerous articles on the web on dog training.Credible: Show your site’s credibility by using original research, citations, links, reviews and testimonials. An author biography or testimonials from real customers can help boost your site’s trustworthiness and reputation.High-quality: Your site’s content should be unique, specific and high-quality. It should not be mass-produced or outsourced on a large number of other sites. Keep in mind that your content should be created primarily to give visitors a good user experience, not to rank well in search engines.Engaging: Bring color and life to your site by adding images of your products, your team or yourself. Make sure visitors are not distracted by spelling, stylistic and factual errors. An excessive number of ads can also be distracting for visitors. Engage visitors by interacting with them through regular updates, comment boxes or social media widgets.
Google’s Panda algorithm
Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines
What makes a High-quality page? A High-quality page may have the following characteristics:
- High level of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)
- A satisfying amount of high quality MC (Main Content)
- Satisfying website information and/or information about who is responsible for the website, or satisfying customer service information if the page is primarily for shopping or includes financial transactions
- Positive website reputation for a website that is responsible for the MC on the page
6.1 Low Quality Main Content
One of the most important criteria in PQ (Page Quality) rating is the quality of the MC, which is determined by how much time, effort, expertise and talent/skill have gone into the creation of the page and also informs the E-A-T of the page.Consider this example: Most students have to write papers for high school or college. Many students take shortcuts to save time and effort by doing one or more of the following:
- Buying papers online or getting someone else to write for them
- Making things up
- Writing quickly, with no drafts or editing
- Filling the report with large pictures or other distracting content
- Copying the entire report from an encyclopedia or paraphrasing content by changing words or sentence structure here and there
- Using commonly known facts, for example, “Argentina is a country. People live in Argentina. Argentina has borders.”
- Using a lot of words to communicate only basic ideas or facts, for example, “Pandas eat bamboo. Pandas eat a lot of bamboo. Bamboo is the best food for a Panda bear.”
- Harmful or malicious pages or websites
- True lack of purpose pages or websites
- Deceptive pages or websites
- Pages or websites which are created to make money with little to no attempt to help users
- Pages with extremely low or lowest-quality MC
- Pages on YMYL websites that are so lacking in website information that it feels untrustworthy
- Hacked, defaced or spammed pages
- Pages or websites created with no expertise or pages which are highly untrustworthy, unreliable, unauthoritative, inaccurate or misleading
- Websites which have extremely negative or malicious reputations
- Violations of the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines
- No helpful MC at all or so little MC that the page effectively has no MC
- MC which consists almost entirely of “keyword stuffing”
- Gibberish or meaningless MC
- “Auto-generated” MC, created with little to no time, effort, expertise, manual curation or added value for users
- MC which consists almost entirely of content copied from another source with little time, effort, expertise, manual curation or added value for users.
Sometimes it is impossible to figure out the purpose of the page. Such pages serve no real purpose for users. For example, some pages are deliberately created with gibberish or meaningless (nonsense) text. No matter how they are created, true lack of purpose pages should be rated Lowest quality.
12.7 Understanding User Intent
It can be helpful to think of queries as having one or more of the following intents.
- Know query, some of which are Know Simple queries
- Do query, some of which are Device Action queries
- Website query, when the user is looking for a specific website or webpage
- Visit-in-person query, some of which are looking for a specific business or organization, some of which are looking for a category of businesses
- To share information about a topic
- To share personal or social information
- To share pictures, videos or other forms of media
- To express an opinion or point of view
- To entertain
- To sell products or services
- To allow users to post questions for other users to answer
- To allow users to share files or to download software
Google’s guidance on building high-quality websites
- 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?
Some content quality signals you can control
- Broken links. Crawl your site with a program like Screaming Frog and fix them.
- Wrong information. Do research and find the right sources.
- Grammatical mistakes. You can use a tool like Grammarly or have someone proofread your writing.
- Spelling mistakes. Use spell-check or an editor.
- Reading level. The Hemingway App is good for this. You should be adjusting your reading level based on your target audience and the intent of the query.
- Excessive ads. Just don’t.
- Page load speed. Go read this.
- Website features. The features you should have will change depending on the type of website and the intent of the query.
- Matching the user intent with the purpose of a page and type of content expected. Take a look at the search results to see what is already ranking.
- Authority and comprehensiveness. Keep reading.
How do I determine quality content?
- Concepts and entities
- Co-occurrence of keywords/phrases
- Topical completeness
Concepts and entities
Co-occurrence of keywords and phrases
Topical completeness
Final thoughts
Google Home Page Testing Gray Background
By Unknown on 11:18:00 AM in Background , Google , Google Home Page , Gray Background , Home Page
Google Doesn't Filter Gold Stars Reviews From Specific Industries
By Unknown on 11:11:00 AM in Gold Stars , Google , Reviews , Specific Industries
Just asked John Mu and he is not aware of any filter being applied to industry. He did say that they don't like if the review markup is sitewide or on irrelevant pages. Also they don't like if testimonials are used within the markup.
Bing News PubHub For News Submissions
By Unknown on 11:10:00 AM in bing , News , News Submissions , PubHub
- Newsworthiness – Report on timely events and topics that are interesting to users. Content that doesn’t focus on reporting, such as how-to articles, job postings, advice columns, product promotions, is not considered newsworthy. Similarly, content that consists strictly of information without including original reporting or analysis, such as stock data and weather forecasts, is not considered newsworthy.
- Originality - Provide unique facts or points of view. Faced with numerous sources frequently reporting similar or identical content, originality or uniqueness becomes a critical way to determine the value to a user of an individual story.
- Authority – Identify sources, authors, and attribution of all content. News sites with authority maintain the highest level of trust and respect from our users.
- Readability – Create content with correct grammar and spelling, and keep site design easy for users to navigate. Advertising should never interfere with the user experience.
Having Issues With Your Google Disavow File? Upload One Line At A Time
By Unknown on 11:06:00 AM in Google , Google Disavow , Issues
Google's John Mueller On Flat (Not Growing) SEO Traffic
By Unknown on 11:05:00 AM in Google , Google's , John Mueller , SEO Traffic
- This is a good example page: http://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines
- Been around for about 3 years
- Mostly works like a structured Q&A site with wikipedia elements to it as products are a rapidly changing area and our site keeps up with new releases etc.
- Google traffic is about 350k a month and pretty flat.
- We've done a lot of work on algorithmically noindexing content until it hits a quality threshold. A lot of currently noindexed pages are still in the index (such as our /comments links) unfortunately.
- Our content/community is growing really quickly, around 30/40% each month. We also have 24/7 moderation.
@StuartKearney If it's flat for a while, look at the pages with traffic: do they change? do the new ones show up?