Google: "Search Quality is Down, We Will Find You"

When a script can determine quality, then this might be an issue.

However, in the spirit of the article link, I suppose we can expect to see all of the article directories disappear because they are loaded with crap.

I guess we can also expect to see all non-native english speakers/writers sites disappear as well. The intent of the content might be good but the delivery often sucks.

Might as well throw in most e-commerce sites since a quick paragraph and price doesn't equal quality content. Bye-bye amazon and wal-mart.

There is far too much Claiming victory before the war is over. I'll believe it when I see it and until then google can continue their PR campaign to make everyone believe they are actually doing something.

Whatever move they try to make, it's going to hurt legitimate sites.

Article directories would be a very good resource if you didn't have to navigate through the crap. Hopefully this will lead to high quality article sites.

No one would like to see high quality content be the biggest factor in ranking more than me, but just because google wants to filter out all the crap sites, doesn't mean that they have the technology to do so.

Google has always said that they don't want crap sites to rank and they have taken the measures that they can to stop them from ranking.

The problem is that this needs to be done carefully or you end up taking out a lot of good sites in the process. There's not enough resources in the world to look at each site with human eyes so it needs to be done algorithmically and I don't believe the technology is anywhere near being able to tell "good" content.

Heck!!! They can't even perform a "paid links scheme" report!! Or cloaked pages report!!! How are they supposed to be dealing with "low quality content"????

This is getting really out of control.

Edit: Just last week I saw a site ranking top 3 thats has nothing more then a couple pages with NO CONTENT. Well, it has 30 words between Adsense.

I reported this exact site almost 6 months ago. So what gives? Quality score?

Disclaimer: that's a site in a niche I never had a site and don't intent to: it's homedecor.

Thanks for bringing this up! As someone who hates article writing and loves good article writers I hope you are wrong about that price change

I predict this thread will end-up getting locked. But until that happens...

Take a close read at the article in the OP. I love the comment one person
makes about G having become a tropical paradise for marketers. All the sites
have links that either make them or G money.

Oh my doG... those evil marketers who just want to make money!!!

Oh.. hey warriors, that's you. I forgot! Sorry... lol. It's also G.

But, today, I was researching something and THIS was my result in Google.

This is Google's idea of delivering high quality search results.

By the way, my hearing's fine.




I just love the way people blame everything that's wrong with G search
on dastardly article spinners.

Read the comment from Wired, too. I'm sure all of their content is spun.


Ken

I don't think it's going to be the content per se that they are going to try and measure but everything else instead.

You are right when you say that quality cannot be measured algorithmically but there are a lot of other variables associated with that content that can.

Mainly traffic and backlinks. Google could easily measure parameters that would easily reveal low quality and so could rate the content accordingly.

Take for example the latest craze for profile links to create backlinks to your pages. There are pages ranking well just from a few hundred profile links but you or me would look at this backlinking profile and see exactly what is going on in a second.

We would then be inclined to think that this page has its rankings due to the links and not the content. Take another backlink profile that has contextual, natural links on authority sites and we would expect a lot more to find quality at the end of it.

This stuff is measurable. They may not be doing it just yet but if they can and they need to, bet your ass they will.

And what about traffic. Bounce rates, time on site, traffic from a natural and varied number of sources, social media popularity. They could all be measured more accurately and used to 'measure' quality. It may not be perfect but...

What about promotion of user feedback - if google provided more of an incentive for users to rate sites themselves they could use that to police the SERPs - social media may be the new algorithm?

@sitefurnace - I do agree with you, in fact Bill Platt actually had a great way they could tell if a site/page had good quality that he posted about in another thread and that was if they content got syndicated on other sites in the niche - sites with some authority of course where your content would have to be approved (not article directories).

Of course, not every website puts articles out for syndication and some of those could be really great sites, so you wouldn't want to punish them because of that.

Yeah, that would be a good thing to look at, but can google measure those things on every site even if there is not analytics installed?

I'm not a fan of this - too easily gamed. I can just picture all the people running to mturk to get workers to report their competitiors.

Lee

Google, you want to clean up the mess? Here is what you do.

You're current algorithm is based more or less on backlinks, so...

Give no value to a backlink coming from a PR 0 or n/a page. This just about eliminates all forms of artificial backlinking.

10,000 forum profiles, spam comments and re-spun articles on EZA will have no value. The added bonus, people will stop abusing those sites to rank their own.

The result: sites that actually have valuable backlinks from reputable sites will continue to do well. The rest will drop into the abyss.

That one alteration to the algorithm will clean up most of your problems in a nano-second.

Google, are you listening to me?

It's not a perfect solution but I don't think there is a perfect solution. But I do think it would clean up a lot of the mess. Eliminates most random link spamming of blogs and forums.

And BTW, that solution would kill me financially. I'd be the next one posting a Poor Me, I have no money thread.

@ The OP

YAWN!!!!!!!!..............

Chris

My Empire = House of Cards.

I do get what you are saying Bay37. Any change brings about it's own set of problems.

And this is why I am not receiving a juicy six figure salary from the google mothership. But every village does need it's idiot... google, me + you = bliss

Google owns us.

even if google's share of the search market drops, people will go to yahoo, bing, ask.com and still marketers will appear on the SERPs. It's all about backlinks unfortunately