Critics will say the higher the barrier to entry is to rank high in Google natural listings the more attractive Google Adwords begins to look to those other businesses. It all probably correlates quite nicely too, with the type of sites you don’t want links from. Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
For me, the important thing is to make a page relevant to a user’s search query. At the moment, I prefer long-form pages and a lot of text, still focused on a few related keywords and keyphrases to a page. Useful for long tail key phrases and easier to explore related terms. Instead of thinking about thequantityof theMain Content text, you should think more about thequalityof the content on the page. Google has plenty of options when rewriting the query in a contextual way, based on what you searched for previously, who you are, how you searched and where you are at the time of the search.
Take unnatural links out of the equation and you are left with page level, site level and off-site signals. It is easy to imagine all these quality ratings are getting passed along to the engineers at Google in some form to improve future algorithms – and identify borderline cases. This is the ‘quality’ bar I’ve mentioned a couple of times in past posts. Google is always raising the bar – always adding new signals, sometimes, in time, taking signals away.
Nobody knows for sure which patents are implemented into the core search algorithms. When it comes to rating user satisfaction, there are a few theories doing the rounds at the moment that I think are sensible. When a user uses Google to search for something, user behaviour from that point on can be a proxy of the relevance and relative quality of the actual SERP. Yes, you must write naturally but if you have no idea the keywords you are targeting, and no expertise in the topic, you will be left behind those that can access this experience. Google said there is no minimum word count when it comes to gauging content quality. Some pages, for example, can get away with 50 words because of a good link profile and the domain it is hosted on.
We will consider these kinds of pages to have deceptive page design. Use the Lowest rating if the page is deliberately designed to manipulate users to click on Ads, monetized links, or suspect download links with little or no effort to provide helpful MC. Google has a history of classifying your site as some type of entity, and whatever that is, you don’t want a low-quality label on it. Manual evaluators might not directly impact your rankings, but any signal associated with Google marking your site as low-quality should probably be avoided. If you have location pages that serve multiple locations or businesses, then those are not doorway pages and should be improved uniquely to rank better, according to John’s advice. There is some confusion for real businesses who THINK they SHOULD rank for specific locations where they are not geographically based and end up using doorway-type pages to rank for these locations.
Pages that ask for personal information without a legitimate reason (for example, pages which ask for name, birthdate, address, bank account, government ID number, etc.). Pages with suspicious download links, which may be malware. Some pages are designed to manipulate users into clicking on certain types of links through visual design elements, such as page layout, organization, link placement, font color, images, etc.
Although – back in the day – if you wanted to rank for misspellings – you optimised for them – so – poor spelling would be a POSITIVE ranking looking back not that long ago. NO website in a competitive market gets valuable traffic from Google without a lot of work. Not, at least, one of the 200+ quality signals Google uses to rank pages.
From my own experience, an unsatisfying page-experience signal can impact rankings even on a REPUTABLE DOMAIN and even with SOUND, SATISFYING CONTENT. Google has algorithms that target low-quality content and these algorithms are actually trained in some part by human quality raters. Google has many quality algorithms these days that demote content and websites that Google deems as providing a lower-quality user experience. The time it takes for this to happen (at Google’s end) leaves a lot to be desired in some niches and time is something Google has an almost infinite supply of compared to 99% of the businesses on the planet. Google organic listings are reserved for ‘remarkable’ and reputable’ content, expertise and trusted businesses.
From my original notes about Google Penguin, I list the original, somewhat abstract and metaphorical Panda ranking ‘factors’ published as a guideline for creating high-quality pages. Google quality raters are trained to be sceptical of any reviews found. It’s normal for all businesses to have mixed reviews, but “Credible, convincing reports of fraud and financial wrongdoing is evidence of extremely negative reputation“. The entire budget of my time went on content improvement, content re-organisation, website architecture improvement, and lately, mobile experience improvement and CTA (Call-To-Action) optimisation. The likelihood of you ranking stable at number one is almost non-existent in any competitive niche where you have more than a few players aiming to rank number one. It’s important to note your website quality is often judged on the quality of competing pages for this keyword phrase.
In this video, we are told, by Google, thatgrammar is NOT a ranking factor. In part, they shifted a lot of long tail visitors to pages that Google thought may satisfy their user query, RATHER than just rely on particular exact and near match keywords repeated on a particular page. When a user is actively seeking your page out and selects your page in the SERP, they are probably training Google AI to understand this is a page on a site that satisfies the user intent. This user behaviour is where traditional media and social media promotion is going to be valuable if you can get people to search your site out. This is one reason you should have a short, memorable domain or brand name if you can get one. The high-quality text content of any nature is going to do well, in time, and copywriters should rejoice. Google has many patents that help it determine the quality of a page.
A lot of this is all RELATIVE to what YOUR COMPETITION are doing. The aim is to create a good user experience, not fake it, just as the aim with link building is too not make your links look natural, but for them to be natural. This isn’t about manipulating quality Raters – it is about making it EASY for them to realise you are a REAL business, with a GOOD REPUTATION, and have a LEVEL of EXPERTISE you wish to share with the world. Black Hats will obviously fake all that (which is why it would be self-defeating of me to publish a handy list of signals to manipulate SERPs that’s not just “unnatural links”).
If you have an optimised platform on which to publish it, high-quality content is the number 1 user experience area to focus on across websites to earn traffic from Google. Perhaps Domain age may come into play when other factors are considered – but I think Google works very much like this on all levels, with all ‘Google ranking factors’, and all ranking ‘conditions’. But that’s not the age of your website address ON apple marketing ITS OWN in-play as a ranking factor. Getting links from ‘Brands’ (or well-cited websites) in niches can also mean getting ‘quality links’. Domain authority is an important ranking phenomenon in Google. Quality Raters are rating Google’s ‘experiments’ and manually reviewing web pages that are presented to them in Google’s search engine results pages . We are told that these ratings don’t impact your site, directly.