Site/Page Quality
The quality of a website is important when search engines are determining the ranking of pages. Ensuring your website provides high quality, useful and informative content is also essential for a positive user experience. Within our Hangout Notes we cover insights from Google around how they determine a quality website, with recommendations for ensuring your site provides quality content for users.
Aggregator Content Can Outrank Orginal Source if Latter is Lower Quality
Original source of content can be outranked by aggregator sites with duplicate content if former is seen as lower in quality by Google. In this case John recommends working on improving the overall quality of a site to prevent this from happening.
Manual Reviewing Tests Algorithms Not Page Quality on Individual Sites
Manual reviews are usually used to test different variations of algorithms created by Google engineers. Google don’t manually review web pages and use the results to inform rankings.
Presence of Rich Snippets in Site: Query But Not in Normal Search Indicator of Low Site Quality
A good indicator of site quality can be gained from using a site: query. If rich snippets are displayed using site: query but not in normal search, this is an indicator Google doesn’t trust your site from a quality point of view.
Google Does Look at Overall Quality of Websites
Google does occasionally look at the overall quality of websites which are made up of the quality of the individual pages on that site, so if a large proportion of pages are low quality, that will reflect how Google sees the website as a whole. You can noindex low quality content but best solution is to improve on it.
Duplicate Content On Its Own Doesn’t Mean That Site is Low Quality
A website should be able to stand on its own and somewhere where users go to specifically to find content. This usually means providing unique content but the presence of duplicate content doesn’t make a low quality website.
Quality Raters Improve Algorithms Rather Than Evaluate Individual Sites
Quality raters are, for the most part, looking for things to do with specific parts of algorithms not necessarily flagging sites with regards to reputation.
Quality is Measured at a Page and Site Level
Google looks at quality on a per page basis as much as possible, but they also look at the overall picture which is affected by the individual pages.
Noindexed Pages Don’t Impact Site Quality
Site quality is only measured on indexable pages. If the quality of pages cannot be improved, you can use a noindex on low quality pages.
Google Doesn’t Care About HTML to Text Ratio
HTML to text ratio doesn’t matter to Google, as long as HTML page doesn’t exceed their size limit (~100mb), but it can result in slow pages which affects usability.
Google Recognises When a Different Site is Launched on an Old Domain
When a new site appears on a domain that was previously used by a different site or company, Google attempts to recognise it as a different site.