The New Google Ranking Factor – High Quality Websites

Ever since Google’s Panda update, we at Pipon and other Search Engine Optimisers have spent a large amount of time attempting to understand what had changed in regards to the ranking factors that determined organic rankings.

On Friday, Google attempted to give many of us guidance by acknowledging that their recent updates were focused on user experience.  With this in mind, Google also released some advice on building high quality sites through their blog.  This advice is crucial in understanding how the new updates affect your website and is the main important tips are summarized in the four key points below:

1)   Build trust with your site users – trust can be measured by the links awarded to the site, with the more authoritative links making the site more trustworthy.  Coincidentally, the site itself can impact on it’s own trustworthiness by ensuring that it does not link to low quality or penalized sites, since that would also decrease trust and render it a low quality site.  If high quality incoming links are not available, then a solution could be to analyse and optimize the site’s social media presence.  Is the site being talked about on twitter or Facebook?  How authoritative are the users sharing these links?  Addressing all these factors will have an impact on the trust of your site and the quality. 

2)   Improve the content of the site – With the new update, Google is now not only concerned with detecting pages with no unique or original content – but will now algorithmically detect how deep the content of a page goes in covering a subject.  If the site is seen as providing a comprehensive description of the topic at hand it is more likely to achieve status as a high quality site. Original content or information is thus crucial – if your website regurgitates what hundreds of other people have already said then it would be a difficult task getting it to rank.  A high quality website will therefore add a thoughtful and unique angle to a topic.

3)   Clean the site of redundant, duplicate or overlapping pages – redundant pages may refer to pages that are buried very deeply within your site but have not acquired any external links whatsoever.  If your domain has a large amount of this type of content, with a higher number of old pages with no links compared to pages with links, then your site would have definitely been at risk from the Panda update. 

4)   Do the pages have spelling, stylistic or factual errors? – Bad grammar definitely does not generate a good user experience and it is also easy to detect for search engines.  Improving the grammar on your site and making content easy to read is therefore another tool in improving site quality. 

It is safe to say that the Panda update will have the SEO industry analyzing its effects for a while to come.  What we do know, however, is that the quality of a website is now as important as ever.  Following these tips will help, however if you have any more questions on website development or SEO optimization please contact Pipon Solutions.