Quality of Content

[dustincarabello]

I've read a few articles stating that google will base your ranking partially on content quality. How does google determine the quality of your articles? Sorry, noob question I know. But I'm very much a noob.

 

[jcorkern]

Hi dustincarabello,

Maybe I can help you see a little more clearly on this topic.

Google is getting better and more than just content, they are starting to master context. If you look at todays machine learning and AI, we now have sites like Grammerly, an online tool that even college professors tell their students to run their papers through before turning in an assignment or paper.

Google also has "scholarly articles", most call them peer reviewed. It's not just the publications they are published in, but more of the structure and level of vocabulary within the content. They can grade your work into categories like grade school, high-school, first year college and so forth.

There is also the amount of keywords in the content that gives it more relevance than others. There is LSI (Latent semantic indexing), character string analysis and other factors.

It would make sense that in today's search results, the longer the content, the more traffic you get. This holds true with better rankings for longer, well researched and written content that is engaging and so useful that it spreads on it's own via social media.

Google see's all of these signals and judges content in part (a large part) by how long someone stays on any given page, what the pages click through rate is, the bounce rate and much more that they can use to judge the quality of the content in question.

Brian Dean has a great post about how to produce quality content, but just calls it viral content in this post, but the attributes he points out can and will make or break you, either now, or in the future. Moz has one called 10X content. It's also a good read.

Hope this helps.

If you have other questions, feel free to ask.

 

[dustincarabello]

Thank you for such a thorough answer. That was incredibly helpful!

 

[Indi IT Academy]

Hello dustincarabello,
As per my understanding google now judge quality of content based on following five factors

Relevancy of the content:- It means is you content relevant to your services or product ? e.g. if you are selling a women high heel shoes online and your content is about general shoes about women than your content is not relevant to your product and it's a negative signal to google. You have to write the content related women high heels shoes.

Uniqueness of the content:- Content of you blog/ website must be unique in the sense you must not copy it from other web page you can copy the ideas what you have write it in own language

Length of the content:- The more lengthy your content is more good it is for ranking


reading ease of the content:- you content must be easy and pleasant to read , if your content is to tough to read user can bounce from your webiste and if font of your content is not pleasant to user eyes its bad signal too

Grammar and mistakes in content:-

 

[AZee1990]

@jcorkern, I totally agree with you..

 

[Manju005]

I think you are not heard about google penguin, panda and humming bird updates. when google panda update roll out then a huge number of sites with bad quality or copied content get penalised. humming bird is another update by google that focus on meaning rather than on just keyword.

 

[bruce-mesnekoff]

Perhaps the most important SEO factor after creating good content is good keyword research. There are a variety of tools that allow you to discover the specific ways that people may be searching for your content.

You want to create content using those keywords, the actual search terms people are using, so you can produce content that effectively “answers” that query.

Thanks
Bruce Mesnekoff

 

[contentpimp]

Very informative thread.
Keep them coming!

 

[jcorkern]

Perhaps the most important SEO factor after creating good content is good keyword research. There are a variety of tools that allow you to discover the specific ways that people may be searching for your content.

You want to create content using those keywords, the actual search terms people are using, so you can produce content that effectively “answers” that query.

I hardly ever break open keyword planner or other keyword tools. I build pages that I would call topic pages. They are so complete, so useful and so long that I have no need for keyword research anymore.

Just the sheer amount of words on that post/page covers any potential keywords that could exist for that topic. We are dealing with a semantic web and Google now understands context compared to content.

What Google has been preaching for a decade and a half is now our reality. Write for the visitor, be complete, correct, well sourced and make sure all of the subtopics are covered and you have a ready made post/page that needs no keyword research.

Brian Dean has a post called "The Definitive Guide To Link Building", but it ranks for hundreds of phrases, including "link building" which is the highest search volume term with link building. It's a two word phrase.

These are the types of post and pages I build exclusively now when attempting to rank.

Although "review" and "best" types of keywords have much higher conversion rates, you use topic pages that rank for a monumental amounts of phrases and divert the visitors from that post/page to your money pages... such as your review pages.


My average content length in a post/page are now around 3500 words, not counting images, infographics, video and other related content.

I have many in excess of 5k words. So considering this, what are the odds that in a semantic web, that I will cover the vast majority of keywords in that content?

You only need to know your top level keyword or phrase, write an exceptional title with your one keyword in the title, use sub-headlines that make sense for the reader, and produce outstanding content.

You don't even have to rank for the main keywords, just get a handful of links from outreach and work social media and you can have pages that generate thousands of visitors a day in less that 60 days from completion, not counting social referrals.

With this type of plan, you can acquire EDU links from high trust and authority pages, .gov links and many from top influencers within your niche.

Stop worrying about keyword research, build awesome content that is built on a topic and you will crush it.

You mentioned that there are a variety of keyword tools out there. Why do you think these keyword tool companies are pushing this mindset?