What counts as a high quality website? Google recently changed their algorithms to help people find “high quality” websites by reducing the ranking of websites that have low-quality content.
Of course, we aren’t disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don’t want folks to game our search results; but if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue:
- 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?
And the list goes on. Another important quote from the same article talks about how low-quality content on your website can impact the whole website’s ranking.
One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.
Search Engine Optimization is a major component of your website strategy and should be taken seriously. Competing for top ranking positions in your industry is similar to a horse race; you and your competitors are jockeying for position. Are you winning the race? Having a high-quality web design will greatly help your ability to become one of the top ranked companies in your industry.
