What Makes Content “Quality”?
There have been four (count ‘em) Google algorithm updates in the two weeks.
That’s got to be a record.
They were:
- Panda algorithm update (September 27th): A large update, Panda targets low-quality content, spun content, content farms, etc.
- Exact Match Domain update (September 28th): Discounts the “boost” exact-match domains previously received in the search engines.
- Penguin update (October 5th): This was a smaller Penguin data refresh (not a change to the algorithm)
- Top Heavy update (October 9th): Thus update targets sites that have primarily ads with little to no content above the fold
The most devastating has been the Panda algorithim update. Many folks think they were effected by the EMD update the next day (because they have an EMD or a partial-match domain) but were actually decimated by the Panda update.
Panda’s focus is on serving high-quality content by penalizing and weeding out the low-quality stuff.
And the toughest thing I see in our community of publishers is believing that our own content *IS* quality…
Even though sometimes it’s not.
Here’s an example:
(This was a comment Tom left on a blog post about the EMD update. Tom was likely hit by the Panda update, not the EMD update. At that time, Google hadn’t announced they had done a Panda Update, thus the confusion for many publishers).
Does content being original make it quality?
Does content being a certain length make it quality?
If so, how many words? Is it 300? Is it 1000?
If content is outsourced, is it therefore not of quality?
I’m not picking on Tom, because I’ve never seen his sites and I do know what he was getting at. We’ve got this limited language to describe “quality.” So his comment struck a chord with me.
We talk a lot about quality content. And we talk a lot about good content being more then a few sentences (common sense, right?) and not copying content from other sources (double duh!).
But those things alone don’t make for real quality…
There’s an essence. A something else. Something more than just originality and word count.
A lot of publisherss with really bad sites (in the eyes of Google – and probably a lot of humans) are mad, because they just don’t or can’t see their site as low quality.
It’s your baby. Your craft it, you cradle it, you feed it links and plugins and words. And it’s hard to see it in other people’s eyes. It’s hard to see that it’s actually quite ugly and low quality when we’ve worked our fingers to the bone (and our brains to fried eggs) creating them.
And I think we need a better way to describe it than just “high quality.” That’s pretty subjective. We need a more objective, clear way to describe “high quality” content.
In the spirit of crowdsourcing, I want your input.
Is it like “hard-core pornography” in that it’s hard to define, but:
I know it when I see it.
I think we, as a whole community, can do better than that.
How would you describe quality content? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Hi Michelle,
I believe that quality comes through in a post when you put “YOU” in the content. If you have a passion for what you are writing about and set the right intention, then I don’t think that you can go far wrong.
Also you would expect to provide value to the visitor/reader as you don’t want to be wasting their time. (And you want them to come back for more)
Peter
Hi Michelle,
I enjoyed your post here and as an avid blogger for some years, (with an exact match domain name that no longer enjoys the positioning it once did) but here’s the weird part, my Alexa score has never been lower and my increase in search engine traffic has never been higher for this particular blog. With regards to quality .. it has to be judged by your readers eyes and still a great indicator of that is a low bounce rate and “sticky” posts and pages.
The paid advertising route is extremely very attractive
Take care!
Within reason, I think Google will never truly be able to detect quality content on it’s own. Hence why social signals are becoming more important. Purely because “quality” has such a broad meaning.
A lot of people at the moment think quality content is paragraphs and paragraphs of content.
But think about this. What If I typed in Google “release date of so-and-so book” – all the user is really looking for with that search term is something like “so-and-so book will be released on 23/2/2013″
Any extra content may be “useful” but that’s not what the search asked for.
To the user who searched for my example, that once sentence IS quality content. It’s exactly what they wanted to know.
Again, I think this is why Google is using “social” as an easy way to detect quality content. It’s letting people decide what it quality or not.
Links used to decide this but are too easily manipulated.
Quality content doesn’t have a specific number of words or sentence structure.
Basically it is delivering content that your visitors actually find useful and therefore they stick around and read it, they find it good enough to share with others and they come back for more.
Lists, stats, breaking news, tutorials..those kinds of content that people get excited about finding. Think about your own internet surfing. What happens when you find a really good bit of information or product?..you share or you link.
Things really haven’t changed as far as what matters to Google, all that has changed is that they no longer accept 50 articles or posts about the exact same subject unless it gives the readers some new insight.
Hi Michelle,
Thanks again for giving us all the heads up on this. (It’s good having you in our corner, because it means I don’t have to worry about keeping up with all the SEO madness these days, ‘cos you are always spot on and tell us what to do!).
Anyhow, one thing I have noticed and suspected for a long time is that engagement (time on page) is being measured by Google.
I suspect that how long people spend interacting with your articles/pages, has a direct impact on whether Google views your site as low quality, even if it has ‘original’ content.
I have also noticed that lots of folks spend a long time on my site after I send out an email broadcast to my list, and I am certain Google measure that and how folks interact/react to my emails if they are using Gmail. (Big brother?
I also notice a direct correlation in traffic/rankings when I publish a new article on my site. Even though I do not publish one very often, when I do I find within a few days (again with good interactivity – visitor time spent) rankings edging up etc. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have massive traffic sites, but I have noticed these things nonetheless.
What sort of engagement time do I mean? Well a lot of my visitors are spending 3-30 minutes on each article (just like yours here are I reckon) so I think visitors find valuable info when they visit and Google notice that.
Keep up the good work and thanks again Michelle.
Thanks
Dave
Frankly I don’t know anymore. If you are creating a site to generate an in-person visit or a phone call especially for a local business then your call to action needs to be in the users face to get them to take the action to get them what they need. “Is this you? Do you need this? go here etc”
They don’t need 800+ words full of LSI gibberish, especially given they are probably going to be looking at it on a mobile phone. So bounce rates are a misnomer in that regard as the searchers intention will cause them to back arrow as soon as they have a phone number or email contact form filled in. Maybe G thinks that customers will just be looking at their Google + local page results and get the phone number or directions straight away like that. Where does that leave websites?
In the years when the Total Quality Movement was sweeping the land, quality was famously defined as “conformance to expectations.” This reinforces what others have said, that quality content means giving visitors what they are looking for, and in theory one measure of that would be time on site or low bounce rate. But another dimension is that the perception of quality is always relative, and may be defined by the guys at Google differently from what a potential client is earnestly looking for. Quality also means minimal defects, so it is possible Google also discounts sites that have spelling errors or poor grammar.
In my own case my RSS site, built up of RSS feeds from other news sites, got really whacked and traffic is way off. Essentially it is almost all duplicate content, taken from other news sites, and Google is obviously discounting that, although the site is a service to thousands of readers who enjoy having area news aggregated in one place (CharlotteAreaNews.com).
To me, good content is anything that is helpful, insightful or entertaining to readers. I don’t think it should be constrained to having content that is X00 words or more, as we are so often taught in IM courses.
Based on current results returned, Google can’t tell what is good from bad, at least not right now. The only thing I can control however, is to produce good work that can be appreciated by my site audience and build a connection with them. And then make sure that there are no backlinks from places that are deemed suspect by Google.
Question:
when we are talking EMD does that also extend to the inner pages? ie http://www.goodideas.co/widgets.html if you are selling widgets does google pennalise your widgets page as EMD?
i am (like many I suspect) at a loss as to the reason why google WOULD penalise EMD. surely it show exact content and is clearly what the site is about?
i import cars and was hit by Pengy. when i then searched the name or model of a car via Google it came back with rows and pages of that car advertised on the same automag National portal…..very unfriendly and very hard to decypher. awful step backwards IMHO
Hi Michelle.
What Google is doing I think is a good thing. Unfortunately, it is going to weed out a lot of people!
I think quality content is well written and insightful. I don’t think they necessarily need be long: a piece could be a simple (but pointed) question with a couple of supporting sentences.
As some one else in thread put, it has to have soul; essence; a “you-ness” about it.
By way of example, this is what I think quality content in the future will look like (or at least one form of it anyway):
I remember at Uni when us students had to write up assignments. The worst marks (if any at all) went to the students who just copied chunks of text from the textbooks.
Better marks were awarded if you actually referenced where you inserted a particular piece of work you used. Better marks again were given to students who referenced widely. Not just textbooks, but also research papers, scholarly journals, data published by government agencies.
The best (/top) marks went to students who did all this, but also wove some of their own comments, observations, insight into how a particular piece of work supported the argument they were making or hypothesis they proposed. Adding a solid conclusion was the ultimate.
I think this is what has been missing from the internet for a very long time; resulting in too much sloppy, tasteless sauce, and not enough meat!
Quality content = more meat and less sauce.
Michelle,
Quality equates to percieved value. If the visitor gets value from the content, it is high quality content. The more value, the higher quality.
Unfortunately, as a machine, Google is merely making assumptions anbout what human visitors receive value from, and you know what happens when you assume……
In any case, their assumptions become better as the algorithm gets more refined. That, of course, leaves aside the whole question about whether or not Google is skewing the results in some way in order to increase their ad revenues. They wouldn;t do that, would they????
For me, quality content should ask and/or answer a question and contain multiple forms of media along with the text such as pictures, video, downloads that support the main content. It should also contain links to other quality content related to main piece.
I had a site on page one of google and it has now dropped way down to page 11. It is an exact match domain. It is still a work in progress and had roughly two pages of quality content. It is a .net site. What I find infuriating is the same site with the .com extension is now on page one. Content is basically information on …. coming soon and two links going to affiliate programs. So how does that site rank higher??
Thanks for this blog post. Content creation and publishing is probably my favorite topic in business. I think we need to let our readers determine what is quality and like someone said, let yourself come out. I hate corporate talk and think writing should be personal and friendly.
Quality content is communicating to your audience in your voice in response to what your audience is looking at your content to learn, understand, or get answered. This post is a great example of excellent communication demonstrated by the interaction (and length of time spent on page).
However, it may be difficult to measure quality by length of time on the page if you are providing a call to action needed by the reader. Grabbing a phone number or an address is a great example for my local business clients.
After reading all the responses and this post, I’m trying to figure out where do we go from here in helping my clients provide the best content to help them rank well in Google as well as producing from their call to action.
Theresa
I agree with a lot of what has been said about what makes quality content.
What I don’t understand is how Google bot interprets that content to decide what is “good” and what is “bad”. For example, if someone were to write a 1,000 word article of unique content with proper grammar, would Google consider that “good” content?
It definitely seems like social signals are the key.
Hi Michelle.
Buck Lawrimore has the most succinct definition of what “Quality” is all about. That is “Conformance to Expectations”.
Basically, to over-use an old adage…. If I’m looking for a duck… Then what I find better look like a duck, walk like a duck, sound like a duck, and smell like a duck, etc.. If I find something that looks like a goose, well… it’s close, but it’s NOT what I’m looking for.
Therefore, it’s NOT quality content to me, although someone else may see it as quality (especially if they’re looking for a Goose).
I’ve been examining many of my customers sites (the EMD thing really scared the crap out of me) and they have been unaffected through all of this. My personal sites have done equally well.
There is only one reason that I can discern for this. They’re all hyper-relative to the few keywords that each uses and all the content focus on supporting, and delivering, relevant information about, those few keywords.
Put simply, It is a duck!, and that’s exactly what the searchers were expecting to find when they clicked on the link. The result is that they TALK about these sites, and SHARE these sites, and COME BACK to these sites.
Google can track many items about our sites. That’s a given. It’s apparent that Google now is weighing more on usage, and the appropriate “signals” relevant to it.
We can no longer afford to “add zero” to parts of the equation (ie: all those wonderful “short-cuts” that we’ve been so blatantly been using while skipping other parts all together!)… especially now, when Google is now MULTIPLYING by that same variable. Adding “zero” means no damage or change… MULTIPLYING by Zero means you’ve been wiped out!
I think we’re in the beginning of a more “holistic” and well rounded approach path for Google ranking. They’ve set the bar high, and we need to collect, and Use, ALL the pieces to even reach it.
I only had one site at #1 ever, and it’s still there to this day. A LOT of FB shares, Pinterest pins and 1 tweet. I believe this is why it has remained solid. Because it is being defined as quality by the amount of shares it has naturally received (I never paid for those, they are real). I did write all content my self, but it’s probably not the most exhilarating content on the planet, I am not a writer! As long as people will read it, benefit from it and pass it along in the Social world, it is quality – and I think THAT is what the BIG G wants, and THAT is exactly what You, Ms Michelle, have been saying all along.
It seems to me that Google has not changed what they are trying to do ever since they started their first search engine. They just tweak how they go about it and they have to keep changing because there has been and always will be someone who will try to abuse the system.
Bottom line is, they want the user to find sites relevant to what they are searching for.
With that said, valuable content would be, in my opinion, whatever the searcher needs based on the search term. If you search for “how to make a ring tone” and you find a website that tells you exactly how to do just that, well, that is valuable content, you wouldn’t care if the information was outsourced, borrowed, copied, or original. You wouldn’t care if you got exactly what you need to know in 30 words,300, or 3000.
People who keep the user in mind and not the search engine are the least affected by all of the algorithms that keep coming up.
The problem is that a lot of people, concentrate on how to trick the search engine rather than how to serve the user.
That’s not to discount SEO, you still need to make sure the search engines find your content, but you better have content that the user needs.
Quality depends on the search term, the competition on the search term, the intention of the person about the page and the specific moment this person is seeing this page (and a lot of more factors).
If you build a page of a list of postal codes I wouldn’t consider that page quality information because I know that I could find the same info on the next page. Building a page like that is only a liability because if your information is wrong you will get bad comments, but never good ones.
Factual data while correct, will never be “quality information” in the eyes of consumers, just “correct information”.
While pages solve deeper problems, they get more perceived value by people. It doesn’t matter the lenght of the page or if you just copied portions of the info or has gramatical errors or something else. The only way Google could measure quality is analyzing user behaviour like: time on site, bounce rate, social interaction with the page, number of topical pages about the same subject on the site, etc.
Obviously, it is difficult to solve deep problems from people creating a page with only 300 words.
While more keywords are typed by people (and more queries about the subject), generally more important problems are facing, but the demographics are also important because if someone is very poor, you wouldn’t want to invest money to solve his problem because he has no money to pay for your efforts, so you have to find the right balance to be profitable in the content creation business.
It is much more difficult right now.
The googlebot hasn’t got a clue what is quality content and we really do need to stop beating ourselves up about this.
Yes, there are certain giveaways about page structure that are likely to indicate poor quality – ads in the body div above the fold, no images or videos etc. – but Google has absolutely no automatic way to ascertain the quality of your magnum opus other than:-
1) The correct keyphrases and LSI in the body text
2) The right amount of text (you’ll have to stick your finger in the air and guess at that one, but I reckon it’s about the 1000 word mark)
3) QUALITY INBOUND LINKS
It is STILL all about the links because that is something Google has very sophisticated metrics for, unlike content.
So, don’t waste time trying to outdo Wikipedia, put massive effort into getting the right links, and that’s NOT just high PR but also high Authority.
I think high quality solves a problem or answers a question, providing value, where low or medium quality just writes about a topic, restating information.
One wonder if there truly is a universal, “one size fits all” definition for quality. The whole purpose of all the content on a site is to impart something of value (another term that is not quite definable) to visitors. However, here is the catch: every visitor is going to have his or her individual, highly subjective assessment of whether he or she gained anything from visiting that site, and if the answer is in the positive, just how much he or she gained.That is as far as we mortals are concerned. Who knows about the god Google? Every time the god Google appears to have finally given us mortals definite clues on what the god is looking for in websites, we get yet one more nasty surprise.
I think there are two parts to a ‘quality’ article:
1 – Personality or USP
There needs to be a bit of you in there. A bit of personality. Differentiation. There is so much content out there and the only way to make something unique these days is to add your personal touch (since there is no one out there like you). This is the part of the content that resonates with people. The part that makes them either leave or jump on your bandwagon (you need a bit of both).
2 – Sharability
I think quality content is content that is worth sharing and I think this is exactly what Google is shifting its algorithm towards. The web world has never been more connected and Google understands that high(er) quality articles are those that get shared the most.
Those are just my thoughts
The Awesome answers happening here can be defined as quality. A mix of opinion and facts from real people sharing. I wonder though, when a blog page has so many responses, if there is an easy way to add navigation rather than scrolling down?
Thank you everyone!
Rick Woolsey
I use these three rules:
1. Quality content is Educational. It teaches you something… and something of value. It doesn’t always have to be a “how-to” type post, but you walk away from it thinking, “Hmmm, I didn’t know that.”
2. Quality content is Entertaining. It stirs up some kind of emotion. Almost any emotion will do. But, I’ve found that posts that don’t create any emotion rarely connect with readers.
3. Quality content is Concise. What’s said is said in as few words as possible while still conveying the main point. You don’t write to hear the sound of your own voice. You write to convey a point. Do that and be done.
There’s probably a lot more things you could look at, but the mind can only focus on so much at one time. I’ve found I never implement any kind of strategy that goes beyond 3-5 points… and I believe the 3 above are the most important.