Without VALUE ADD for Google’s users – don’t expect to rank high for commercial keywords. EXIT POP-UPS do not seem to interfere with a readers enjoyment and access to the primary content on a page. At the moment, this type of pop-up seems to be OK for now . I have a feeling an exit-pop up might have a negative impact on some rankings, though; the jury is out. A satisfying UX is can help your rankings, with second-order factors taken into consideration.
There is no minimum amount of words or text to rank in Google. I have seen pages with 50 words out-rank pages with 100, 250, 500 or 1000 words. Then again I have seen pages with no text rank on nothing but inbound links or other ‘strategy’. Google is a lot better at hiding away those pages, though. A one-year-old domain cited by authority sites is just as valuable if not more valuable than a ten-year-old domain with no links and no search-performance history.
In short, it was too easy to manipulate Google’s rankings at the beginning of the decade. If you had enough ‘domain authority‘ you could use ‘thin content‘ to rank for anything. I think I see more of Google pulling pages and sites down the rankings than promoting them because of discovered ‘quality’.
Google is raising the quality bar, and forcing content creators to spend HOURS, DAYS or WEEKS longer on websites if they ‘expect’ to rank HIGH in natural results. Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? We KNOW ads convert well at the top of articles – but Google says it is sometimes a bad user experience. You run the risk of Google screwing with your rankings as you optimise for conversion so be careful and keep everything simple and obvious. If your page has a sloppy design, low-quality main content and too many distracting ads your rankings are very probably going to take a nose-dive. For the rest of us, we’ll just need to work harder to prove you are a real business that has earned its rankings. Unsurprisingly, ranking fat content comes with its own challenges as the years go by.
A poor UX can seriously impact your human-reviewed rating, at least. Google’s punishing algorithms probably class pages as something akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e.g. lack of reputation or old-school stuff like keyword stuffing a site. If you are a real business who intends to build a brand online and rely on organic traffic – you can’t use black hat methods. It can take a LONG time for a site to recover from using black hat tactics and fixing the problems will not necessarily bring organic traffic back as it was before a penalty.
Whether its algorithmic or manual – based on technical, architectural, reputation or content – Google can decide and will decide if your site meets its quality requirements to rank on page one. Surely – that’s NOT a bad thing, to make your site HIGHER QUALITY and correctly MARKETING your business to customers – and search quality raters, in the process. Google holds different types of sites to different standards for different kinds of keywordswhich would suggest not all websites need all signals satisfied to rank well in SERPs – not ALL THE TIME. The quality raters handbook is a good training guide for looking for links to disavow, too. For example in the images below , all pages on the site seemed to be hit with a -50+ ranking penalty for every keyword phrase the website ranked for.
How did you take advantage of being an online business authority 10 years ago? You turned the site into an Pagerank Black Hole to horde the benefits of “domain authority” and published lots of content sometimes with little thought to quality. We more usually talk about domain trust and domain authority based on the number, type and quality of incoming links to a site. This document gives you an idea of the type of quality websites Google wants to display in its search engine results pages.