How to determine a quality site?

[acruz]

Aside from knowing the age of the website, its pagerank and traffic, how can I determine the quality of a website? Share your knowledge. Thanks.

[paulgl]

Define "quality."

What does quality have to do with age, traffic, and pagerank?

That would mean every new site has no quality.

And every old, high traffic, high PR site has quality.

Both of those would be false.

You need to use a different word other than quality.

Paul

[Aaronhiscock]

you can check website quality by its design, content, human interface images, bcaklings amounts from .org and .gov domains etc. you can also include internal linking to judge website quality....

[rspadi]

* Unique and useful content
* Many high quality backlinks - citations from other sites...

[faceblogger]

It all depends on your expectation of "Quality"

[georgefuller]

Content of the website, keyword relevancy and Link Structures.

[MrDay]

I have the Alexa and firefox toolbars installed in the bottom right of my monitor.

Instantly, I can see a site's Alexa, compete, PR and MozRank rankings. These toolbars help me to quickly determine the quality of any website.

There are other factors to consider, especially if it's a brand new site. But a quick glance at the content and layout of the site will quickly tell you the quality too.

[espe]

Google PageRank Checker - Check Google page rank of any web pages

[OCLead]

If you have a good feedback, high traffic, high PR, good keyword density, and good contents and friendly website.

[OrangeTree]

The word quality is, in this instance as in many, subjective. I, too, was tempted to launch into a list of technical criteria. But then, I would, I work for a website building company!

But I am guessing most of my customers will have different criteria. Like how well it delivers their objectives, which usually are about visitors that convert into clients.

[dburk]

Hi acruz,

I guess it depends on what you mean by "quality". The conventional definition of "quality" in the IT industry refers to error-free code. So using the conventional definition it would be any page that validates without error.

There are tools available for Quality Assurance testing:
The W3C QA Toolbox - Validators, checkers and other tools for Webmasters and Web Developers

When it comes to quality content, we could test for spelling and grammatical errors as a Quality Control method.

Here's an online tool that can help with that:
Grammar Check – Free Online Grammar Checker

Hint: Try running the text from your OP to see an example of how it works.

And for SEO quality compliance we can use Google content quality guidelines:
Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help

Of course there are many more specific quality tests that you can do for quality assurance in regards to other features of your site:
Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Welcome to the HiSoftware Cynthia Says Portal
Site-Perf.com - Know all about your site performance
IDI Web Accessibility Checker : Web Accessibility Checker
Web Page Analyzer - free website optimization tool website speed test check website performance report from web site optimization

[Lucid]

I think you are all wrong mostly and not thinking outside the box. Don's post just above is a good start but there's a lot more to having a quality site. I'd say he covers about one third, maybe less.

Google's use of the word quality is not the same definition of most people. It's not PR, age or even aesthetics or navigability as many people assume. In fact, I've been toying with the idea of a $5 ebook, "What Google Considers a Quality Site". The many recent complaints of sites dropping in rank since Panda are likely due to poor quality sites, quality as defined by Google. So all we have to do is come up with those factors that define quality, or rather, what defines low quality.

[MIRENGE]

Keyword relevance, content in your site and the backlinks in your site.

[zenxseo]

quality depends on many thing , site rank, design, traffic , conversion , user safety , and lot more
its up to you what is your priority

[Lucid]

Originally Posted by zenxseo

its up to you what is your priority

Agree that whatever you think is most important, work on that. But if you want to rank well in Google, you have to think of what is important to Google and work on that as well. Other than user safety, I don't think any of your other suggestions are on Google's list of what makes a quality site.

[insurancequotes]

The quality actually depends upon visitors requirements. A website would be considered useful when it serve useful information to their visitors. Like useful content, easy navigation with good color combination and graphics etc.

[kimseo]

For me quality of site depends upon usability of site content.

[paulgl]

Just realized google did a blog post on "high quality sites."

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites

Funny thing, if you read the list, many high authoritative, high PR sites would
be low quality. Google is really aiming the post at people who think they
can toss together a crappy, spammy site and shmooze their way to #1.
In fact, that's really where there attention is focused. You can have a
high PR, high authoritative site, and not necessarily need to follow all
their recommendations. Big difference between the LAtimes and Joe
Shmo's weight loss diet blog, peddling fad diet products.

Paul

[strategic seo services]

Originally Posted by acruz

Aside from knowing the age of the website, its pagerank and traffic, how can I determine the quality of a website? Share your knowledge. Thanks.

Check to see if the PR is greater than 5, and whether or not the site allows dofollow backlinks.

[usta]

and look is it has sitelinks in google (to check search for the domain in google)

[Lucid]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Google is really aiming the post at people who think they can toss together a crappy, spammy site

Paul, I think you're right. Thanks for the link by the way.

Pretty much everything on that list is subjective, nothing that software could determine. I doubt Google has people rating sites and check marking "would I bookmark this page or tell a friend". Only a few things such as grammar and spelling that Don mentioned earlier which software could determine.

I'm afraid every one is still circling around the real issues here. I thought that blog would spill it out but it doesn't. Google must have their reasons so that makes it valuable information to have.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by Lucid

I thought that blog would spill it out but it doesn't. Google must have their reasons so that makes it valuable information to have.

A very keen observation. One which I had myself and was definitely
disappointed. But, yes, it is dang valuable info, especially if I was starting out
with 100 MFA sites. I would change and go for a handful of authoritative
sites. Oh wait! That's what I've been saying for years!

Paul

[Rough Outline]

In terms of SEO, a quality site would have long pages of unique content with video and pictures. It would have easy to use navigation, it would have a sitemap as well.

A quality site would also have quality backlinks pointing to it, not 1000s of poor quality links, that help?

Age isn't a factor of quality, a factor of reliability if anything.

[Lucid]

Well, I wonder if I should spill it out myself, hold on to it, sell it at low cost or a high cost. MFA is one thing that leads to low quality.

Note that low quality doesn't mean you don't rank. You just rank lower than a similar site with higher quality.

[timpears]

Quality is a subjective term, and has no connection to your stats. Quality is determined by the content and possibly the layout.

[Lucid]

Originally Posted by timpears

and possibly the layout.

That's just it. Quality has nothing to do with the layout. I'm sure 99% of people think that but that is just not the case.

Quality is NOT defined by any of the following mentioned in this thread:

age of site
pagerank
Alexa
backlinks
pictures
videos
usability
look and feel
TLD (.com vs .org, .net...)
citations
feedback
high traffic
keyword density

[dburk]

Originally Posted by timpears

Quality is a subjective term, and has no connection to your stats. Quality is determined by the content and possibly the layout.

Hi Tim,

You can view quality as subjective, however I don't think Google views quality as a totally subjective term.

You can set up and measure quality standards. For example, misspelled words and poor grammar can easily be detected. The lack of headings, inadequate spacing in layouts, and certain poorly laid out designs can easily be detected. The lack of contact details, terms and privacy policy, are also easy to detect.

For years anti-spam algorithms have used linguistic analysis to detect spam and Google has studied similar techniques for detecting low quality web content. There are a plethora of linguistic rules that could be used to score your content quality.

I have recently noticed significant changes in rankings by making a few stylistic changes of the same content. This was not noticed before the Panda series of updates.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Just realized google did a blog post on "high quality sites."

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites

Funny thing, if you read the list, many high authoritative, high PR sites would
be low quality.

Those guidelines have factors that make perfect human sense to people but are IMPOSSIBLE for machines at present to discern. I know people always claim Google can do this or that but just look at some of them

" Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?"

umm no we have not reached anywhere near to artificial intelligence for their algo to know what would interesting and obvious to Humans across widely different topics

"Does the article describe both sides of a story?"

LOL Can a computer even know what sides of the story means?

Now they do clue in a lot of the things that a algo can spot -

spelling errors, duplicate content with unoriginality, length of text (although I wonder about that with all the web 2.0 home pages I see with little text that rank). links that indicate authority maybe some semantical analysis that indicates gibberish spun content etc.

Still an interesting article for those reasons.

[Roberto L]

Imagine that you are one of their guests, do you like it or not, why and where you like it? Asking some questions like that , I think you will know is it a good site or not besides other technic datas...

[donkiston]

Quality of a website depend upon these factors
content of a website
Back links of a website
Alexa rank or traffic of a website
and bounce rate of a website.

[lespritb]

Quality in the seance? in seo language I'll say well optimized site.
May be design, domain age, traffic, extension, on-page and off page, back links with traffic as well.

[eddyjoy]

A quality site has:

- Awesome Content (Fresh every now and then)
- Quality Links
- Social media integration
- On Page optimized
- Solves the problems of the visitors (this ensures that they will keep coming)

[odehfehr]

Quality of site depend on its design, page rank, alexa rank, bounce rate and quality back links.

[salikkhan]

Well apart from the PR, The web design should be according to the norms, the pagination factor, link structure... You can check it with the Google webmaster tool. It will give you the HTML Suggestions in Site Diagnosis tab.. Apart from this, you can use website auditor software for the same.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by neeraj77

you can check the quality of any website by the Quality of its content, inbound links in various domain,traffic through search engine, link google,yahoo,msn,etc.

Wrong!

Originally Posted by donkiston

Quality of a website depend upon these factors
content of a website
Back links of a website
Alexa rank or traffic of a website
and bounce rate of a website.

Wrong!

Originally Posted by lespritb

Quality in the seance? in seo language I'll say well optimized site.
May be design, domain age, traffic, extension, on-page and off page, back links with traffic as well.

Wrong!

Originally Posted by eddyjoy

A quality site has:

- Awesome Content (Fresh every now and then)
- Quality Links
- Social media integration
- On Page optimized
- Solves the problems of the visitors (this ensures that they will keep coming)

Wrong!

Originally Posted by odehfehr

Quality of site depend on its design, page rank, alexa rank, bounce rate and quality back links.

Wrong!

Hi neeraj77, donkiston, lespritb, eddyjoy and odehfehr,

I believe you guys are confusing the term "quality" with "value" or "usefulness". Those are different words with different meanings. "Quality" implies freedom from error, defect or meeting a standard, not "value" or "usefulness". I am speaking in context here, the context of search engine listings.

[eurekapsycrille]

I agree with dburk. You can determine if a particular site is a high quality website if it follows the search engines' standards. I think that's the general truth about "quality" websites.

[RMCService]

The first thing I look is the alexa rank, maybe is the most important value I look to define if a website worth my trust or not.
But it depends on the website type, if it is a blog you should look at the number of articles or the comments, if it's a forum you should look at the number of posts and views, if the admin is active or not...

The page rank is the last thing I look because there are a lot of websites I consider authoritative that have a low PR.

Just my 2 cent.

[jbeachum]

Thanks for sharing those sites. I learn something new in here everyday!!!

[m1985nehal]

try to get free SEO quote from some websites. There are many websites available which offers free SEO quote.

[Lucid]

Originally Posted by eddyjoy

A quality site has:

- Awesome Content (Fresh every now and then)
- Quality Links
- Social media integration
- On Page optimized
- Solves the problems of the visitors (this ensures that they will keep coming)

As Don said, Wrong!

These define a quality site in the eyes of the site's owner and visitors, but not in Google's eyes. Google has a different definition of quality.

[kimseo]

Originally Posted by acruz

Aside from knowing the age of the website, its pagerank and traffic, how can I determine the quality of a website? Share your knowledge. Thanks.

You can check the quality of websites by quality and uniqueness of content, User engagement, and site structure and design

[Rollmodl]

Try a website grader Website SEO Tool | Website Grader

[Roberto L]

Keep your eyes on it and see if it is updated frequentely, I think a consistent update is key to one site.

[2423898]

I reckon pagerank is probably the best one. It's based on what someone else says not you.

[mikelmraz]

I think it is original content and how good the content is ...

[grh395]

Originally Posted by acruz

Aside from knowing the age of the website, its pagerank and traffic, how can I determine the quality of a website? Share your knowledge. Thanks.

I think quality is so subjective and I don't think you can rely on things like alexa ranking. And some people manage to get sites listed at the top of search engines with content that seems to be written by spinners or robots. I think the only measure you can use is to decide whether the value you get out of the site is worth the time you spent in the site. I think personally, that you can only measure quality by content.

[Srinagarhouseboats]

You may define this by the domain age , page rank and alexa rank

[addison.agnote]

-Make sure your site can be fully crawled (most important)
-Write top quality interesting content that users will want to link to and bookmark
-Have a differentiator. A hook. Something that makes your site stand out, in order to encourage those repeat visits, backlinks, and bookmarks.
-Continually add new, genuinely unique and interesting content.

[Patrikrose007]

You can't say any specific attributes of a quality website...You just hv to see the site..as Goolge sees it..and that's it....if GG gives higher page rank to website(normally more than 5) then it would must be a quality site.

[WebCEO Official]

The quality of design, usability, copy quality, everything is important. The above posts are right, it depends on what you mean. Try some service to check the site usability and SEO.