Is Google Increasing the Value of Quality sites?

Yes! google loves quality,aged sites.

Good Quality works always get paid. What is better to get for a website if it gets the high Ranking in google. Google is giving priority to the good quality sites over low quality sites after the latest penguin update. Good quality content, site design, on site optimization is very important to become a good website in the eye of Google.

Google is working to reward Quality sites. Google released panda to reduce rankings for low-quality sites which have low value for user, copied content from others and so on.

So I must say Google is improving their search result with quality site.

Definitely yes. I believe Google's algorithm will be able to rate the quality of your content within 5 years

For sure. I think it's more that these sites are replacing the penalized sites.

definitely, IMHO... that's how it should have always been... We don't need crappy sites that provides clutter rather than value for users.

If we create links on LOW PR sites, Is there a chance of getting penalised as well?

Hi

I think Google is trying to that but not always successfully. There will always be a limit to what bots and algorithms can evaluate and the Internet is too huge to manually evaluate everything.

Google started with what they could to evaluate on-page SEO with 'linguistic analysis', LSI over keyword stuffing and looking for clearly laid out sites that are easy to navigate and provide sitemaps etc.

This helps, but algorithms still can't really tell a well written piece from spun spam if both pieces have the expected on-page elements presented in a way that Google favours.

Google also started looking at off-page SEO by checking for things like link velocity, keyword density in anchor text and the source of backlinks.

This also helps, but has a tendency to 'toss the baby out with the bath water' by punishing legitimate, valuable sites who, unfortunately, signed up for a de-indexed blog network or outsourced SEO work that was done using techniques no longer favoured by Google.

Finally Google is looking more at user/visitor signals like social likes/shares, bounce rate, number of pages viewed and time on page.

This also helps, but right now social signals can still be faked and bought fairly effectively and just because some quickly leave a page because there was nothing they wanted, doesn't mean it is a poor page in general.

When doing keyword research, I have found that recent Google updates have worked (almost) as intended in crowded niches and markets with a good selection of true authority sites.

But in smaller niches with much less competition you can easily rank 'crappy' little one-page sites with quality on-page SEO and some (but not a lot) of quality off-page SEO.

Google has to put someone on the front page. With few authority sites and previous dominating MFA sites washed away when their blog networks and backlinks were devalued, many niches and keywords are wide open.

As always, the more competitive a niche, the more work it takes to rank.

Mahlon

Google is trying to improve search quality by bringing informative sites over crappy junk sites.It can't be done in a single day or two.We have to wait for few more refreshes!This is what I can say from a visitors point of view but this type of improvement have eaten up the income for many.

Recent Google changes seem to suggest so. And I think it's for the good. Just take a look at the number of sites Google has started to deindex recently.