Google is a Great Judge of Quality - Personal Experience

[svk_hereiam]

I have been a regular reader of one of the most popular internet marketing blogs over the years... It once had a PR of 7 and then it became PR 6 and is now PR 5.

The gradual decrease in the site's esteem in the eyes of Google over the years does not go hand in hand with the number of the site's visitors. However, the content of the site has seen a slow deterioration over a period of time... guest posters, overly promotional posting etc is evident to any regular reader.

What I am trying to get at is that Google pretty well understands what is good content and what is not... we often talk about PR and how a new page on a high PR site ranks high but we forget that just because you have a high PR site does not guarantee that you will continue to have that if you lower your quality.

[dsouravs]

Hi,
Yup I agree with you.
So your also from my city

Thank you.

[Pasquach]

Interesting post. Thanks.

Never thought google was actually intuituve enough to recognize that.

[zigzag007]

Yep that makes alot of sense. Good observation,

[kirakirafuwafuwa]

Without looking further into the site's link metrics, you can't assume this is true. How do you explain crappy sites ranking on the front page?

[dsouravs]

kirakirafuwafuwa ... makes sense..

[webalfie]

svk_hereiam, I couldn't agree with you more.

Google is smart and has very complex algorithms. But it's all founded on the basic premise that great websites get links. And they get these links from the valuable content they provide.

[svk_hereiam]

Originally Posted by kirakirafuwafuwa

Without looking further into the site's link metrics, you can't assume this is true. How do you explain crappy sites ranking on the front page?

the right links do wonders but what I feel is that crap content + good links can take you to top rankings but can they keep you there? I don't think so... obviously people will make money even if a site is at google page 1 even for a month but google finally catches up.

I might be wrong... but that's why I opened this discussion, to check new viewpoints

[Mark Alan]

IMO Google shows the user what they want them to see. Typically the sites that appear at the top of the organic listings for any moneyed keyword are non-monetized sites like Wikipedia and then the larger corporate content farms like (About.com) which typically have extremely dated stale content all by design to get the user to click on the more relevant results in the PPC listings.

[AlphaWarrior]

Originally Posted by svk_hereiam

What I am trying to get at is that Google pretty well understands what is good content and what is not...

I totally disagree. For web searches for the last couple of months, I have found it very difficult to find what I want (not what G thinks I want) when I search G. Most of the time, I have had to go multiple pages deep and still could not find it. Often, I just give up, go to Bing, and find what I want instantly. In fact, for most searches, I now start with Bing.

As someone who has used AdSense, it is very frustrating when G either cannot tell what my page is about or simply refuses to show relevant ads for whatever their weird reason may be.

If G's algo could really discern "quality", it would be able to match an inquiry with a meaningful result and it could match AdSense ads with what a page is about. In my opinion, G fails miserably on both.

[svk_hereiam]

Originally Posted by AlphaWarrior

I totally disagree. For web searches for the last couple of months, I have found it very difficult to find what I want (not what G thinks I want) when I search G. Most of the time, I have had to go multiple pages deep and still could not find it. Often, I just give up, go to Bing, and find what I want instantly. In fact, for most searches, I now start with Bing.

As someone who has used AdSense, it is very frustrating when G either cannot tell what my page is about or simply refuses to show relevant ads for whatever their weird reason may be.

If G's algo could really discern "quality", it would be able to match an inquiry with a meaningful result and it could match AdSense ads with what a page is about. In my opinion, G fails miserably on both.

your observation has been doing the rounds for quite some time now.... but my personal experience has been different. In most cases, I find what I look for in Google. I use Bing very rarely

[laracoates28]

Definitely agree with you. Content is king. But the condition is your content must be quality content.

[onSubie]

Hi

That isn't how Google calculates PR.

More likely the decline is because Google devalued or deindexed many of the site's backlinks.

Over time the PR juice passed the the main site would decrease followed by a drop in PR.

Mahlon

[MikeFriedman]

I do not know how many times this has to be explained to people. PR has NOTHING to do with content. It is a measure of the quality of incoming links to a page. That is it. Content, quality or otherwise, means nothing when it comes to PR.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by onSubie

More likely the decline is because Google devalued or deindexed many of the site's backlinks.

Even more likely is that since the quality dropped webmasters stopped linking to them . The decline in PR has Nada, zip, nothing to do with Google judging quality. Pagerank is a measure of incoming links thats all. Has NOTHING to do with content.

Now if your quality declines will people stop linking to you? Of course many will and if they do the PR decreases. So theres the explanation without creating a theory that pagerank means Google knows quality.

[cwill184]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

I do not know how many times this has to be explained to people. PR has NOTHING to do with content. It is a measure of the quality of incoming links to a page. That is it. Content, quality or otherwise, means nothing when it comes to PR.

Good response, therefore the links the website in question originally had, has decreased, or the the page rank of those links the website had decreased.

[solemanali]

you are absolutely right dude..quality content is the king so focusing on it will make you money for ever.

[yukon]

The only thing Google remotely understands about quality is keyword relevancy.

[Carl Brown]

I agree with Mike. If you have such a site where the quality drops over the years, the likelihood is that other sites simply stop linking to their "crappy" content. Less high PR sites linking to yours = lower PR.

THIS is the reason to strive for good content. Rankings in google don't come from its ability to recognize quality. What Google can recognize is a site that is recognized by others (through natural backlinks).

[svk_hereiam]

well... that's what I said... when someone says that google can judge quality, it obviously means it applies some sort of algorith since its ultimately a program, nothing else and PR is the key to their quality rating which depends upon the quality of incoming links. over a period of time, if a website decreases in quality, the number of good links to it will decrease and that's when google will decrease its PR...

everything said and done, I have also ranked pages at the top of google without any backlinks whatsoever... so what I feel is that everyone guesses what and how google is functioning and our SEO experts obviously finds ways to rank in google and increasing PR... but it remains a guess no matter how well they rank their pages..

I say this because, had they actually known how google worked, the pandas and penguins wouldn't have created such mayhem across the internet...

All the search engines have come a long way since the starting days (when just metatagging could rank you) and they will continue to improve. bottomline, google will keep changing and so will SEO... but what will not change is quality of content.

[Trevor]

Nice share here.

One point I'd like to mention about PR: PR is important for backlinks, but not in evaluating your competition.

What I mean is, a link from a PR 4 page will very likely do more good to your site than 1,000 PR 0 links. PR is very important for backlinks.

On the other hand, you can very well outrank pages with a new site that have PRs of 2, 3 or even 4. It's not a really important factor in evaluating the strength of your competition. Other factors, such as the number of inbound links, the quality of the backlinks, etc., are.

[MatthewWoodward]

Originally Posted by svk_hereiam

What I am trying to get at is that Google pretty well understands what is good content and what is not

Wahahaha thats the funniest thing I've read in a while.

Google does not have a clue. It has some loose indicators that are easily gamed but thats it. I've seen more and more auto generated articles that are character spun to hell and back ranking recently.

Although I do believe that is something they will get better at over time so you should build out campaigns with that in mind.

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

I do not know how many times this has to be explained to people. PR has NOTHING to do with content. It is a measure of the quality of incoming links to a page. That is it. Content, quality or otherwise, means nothing when it comes to PR.

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Even more likely is that since the quality dropped webmasters stopped linking to them . The decline in PR has Nada, zip, nothing to do with Google judging quality. Pagerank is a measure of incoming links thats all. Has NOTHING to do with content.

Now if your quality declines will people stop linking to you? Of course many will and if they do the PR decreases. So theres the explanation without creating a theory that pagerank means Google knows quality.

What those guys said ^^

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I sense its hopeless Mike. Not aiming at the OP but people on this board are just running with every and anything. Its even worse now that kids are on school break.

Every week there is a SEO is dying thread, some strange ideas about how Google can rate quality like a human can with their computers. some claim that spammy links work and ton loads of other claims with no evidence whatsoever.

I might just have to abandon ship for awhile.

That is exactly why I created my blog, there is so much misinformation across forums. People are dishing out advice without any actual hands on experience, knowledge and testing of their own. Simply repeating what some one else said in a blog/forum post that must be true because its on the internet ^^

This isn't the time to abandon ship though, if anything it is easier than ever to rank because of people taking baseless advice as fact and applying it to their own campaigns.

[prismkuet]

In calculating PR, Google gives importance on the amount of back links. When a site is loosing it's ranking, the possibility is higher that, it is losing backlinks. Reduction of contents quality may not be the prime cause for PR decrease. There are lots of other factors as well. I saw many sites with bad content but good PR.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by svk_hereiam

well... that's what I said... when someone says that google can judge quality, it obviously means it applies some sort of algorith since its ultimately a program, nothing else and PR is the key to their quality rating which depends upon the quality of incoming links. over a period of time, if a website decreases in quality, the number of good links to it will decrease and that's when google will decrease its PR...

That is NOT what you said in the OP. Please be honest. You directly stated Google could identify the good content itself. Fact of the matter is that even a site with great content can lose PR if it stops promoting itself. Its been known to happen. Old sites that link to you stop operating, redesigns get rid of pages that linked to you, sites go nofollow etc. Once again no matter how much you try to cover your point - PAGERANK HAS NADA TO DO WITH quality content

everything said and done, I have also ranked pages at the top of google without any backlinks whatsoever... so what I feel is that everyone guesses what and how google is functioning and our SEO experts obviously finds ways to rank in google and increasing PR... but it remains a guess no matter how well they rank their pages..

Sorry but this is ridiculous. You ranking pages at the top of Google without links means nothing except that you found a keyword (usually long tail ) that no one cared about or was going after. Here I've done this countless times before

Blue Fried tomato shoes

This page will rank for the term shortly. Does that mean that no one has any idea of how Google ranks pages? You are confusing details which we will never know with the big picture. In the big picture we know that Google operates on content and links. We know that Pagerank is a measure of links not quality of content as you assumed. Claiming that the things we don't know make it Ok for you to make up things that contradict what we do know is exactly the kind of reasoning that junks up this board because then everyone comes in with all kinds of ideas stating them as fact with with no substance and claim "well everyones just guessing so I can too. "

I say this because, had they actually known how google worked, the pandas and penguins wouldn't have created such mayhem across the internet...

Again thats silly. those were CHANGES so of course CHANGES would be big news. What you are essentially saying is if we don't predict the future then we can't have known what was in the past.

google will keep changing and so will SEO... but what will not change is quality of content."

What will not change is that you need both quality and promotion. Emphasizing one almost to the exclusion of the other gives a warp view that helps no one. Giving people the impression that if you build it they will come is detrimental as well and thats the take away if ranking and pagerank are just a matter of content.

Google will ALWAYS rely on human being to determine quality, whether its links, social signals or something else. Even decades from now if and when artificial intelligence gets to a point where an algo can determine some quality that reliance on off page human factors will not change. Google is looking to satisfy human beings not machines and the truth is we all have slightly different ideas what that is. Votes of some kind will ALWAYS matter and thats an off page factor.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by MatthewWoodward

This isn't the time to abandon ship though, if anything it is easier than ever to rank because of people taking baseless advice as fact and applying it to their own campaigns.

Hi Matt,

Wasn't referring to abandoning SEO (far from it) but this board. Just generally this summer its gotten the worse I have ever seen it. Theres absolutely no way newbies can learn SEO reading this forum now. we have multiple threads talking about SEO being dead, Multiple crappy threads about Fiverr gigs for SEO, multiple threads saying spam links still work and countless post with people making statements with nothing to back them up that are just dead wrong but they continue to say is right despite the evidence.

[greatestmj]

Recent google updates have made people paranoid. The easy tricks that used to work are not working anymore and so people feel that SEO is dead. Nowadays everyone's thoughts are being claimed as a fact and being shared and so people are learning wrong things all the time.

[yukon]

(links + freshness + keyword relevancy) = ranked

Guaranteed!

SEO freshness isn't what a lot of people think it is, freshness isn't only creating new pages & freshness can defiantly be automated (with quality).

[trustumar]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Blue Fried tomato shoes

This page will rank for the term shortly.

It is not ranking.

[vaital]

It might make sense, but the main signal G should be looking at is popularity. After all, it is popularity that shows a site is liked and thus frequently visited, regardless of ads or what not. Plus, it is the search engine's job to reward the most popular sites simply because they are liked. This is my take on the subject.

[Tamalkrishna]

What you are saying is true. Google is a great judge about the quality of an article. But the thing is that Google doesn't judge anything manually or there is no Google employee who reads your article one by one and tells Google that it is good and that is not. It all depends on how long a visitor stays on your site. If most of your visitors stays on your site for long time, Google thinks that you are creating great content and people are being interested to read that. It's true that if you have quality content which is valuable to people, they will stay will stay on your site for longer time. This is what helps Google understand the value of your content. So it all depends on the duration of time a visitor stays on your site. Somehow if you make it possible to keep a visitor on your site for long time, you may get the same result. But truly speaking, it is not possible without having great quality content.

[paulgl]

You don't drop from PR7 to PR5 due to content.

Given that, not sure what this thread is even talking about.

First we talk about judging content, dropping in PR,
then dropping in rankings (I assume SERPs).

Google, the man behind the curtain, cannot judge content.

A drop in PR would be due to a devaluing of backlinks.

A drop in rankings would be due to many things, as
pointed out in the rest of this thread.

I might also add something that people forget, as far as
"content" goes. They misquote google all the time and
forget about a searcher. If google thinks a page answers
or satisfies a searcher at a given time, content be damned.

If I want to know when Tom Cruise was born, and wikipedia
answers that, then the rest of the crappiness of the article
is tossed.

People have just tried to shmooze google even more, after
suffering from something. So they think they can shmooze
google by screaming they have unique and great content.
In reality, nobody cares. Just a complete misinterpreting of
what google says.

Paul

[yukon]

Originally Posted by vaital

It might make sense, but the main signal G should be looking at is popularity. After all, it is popularity that shows a site is liked and thus frequently visited, regardless of ads or what not. Plus, it is the search engine's job to reward the most popular sites simply because they are liked. This is my take on the subject.

That (popularity) could easily be gamed & would be similar to buying a link blast.