Google is a Great Judge of Quality - Personal Experience

Interesting post. Thanks.

Never thought google was actually intuituve enough to recognize that.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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. "

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.:rolleyes:

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.

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.

What those guys said ^^

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.

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.