Site/Page Quality
The quality of a website is important when search engines are determining the ranking of pages. Ensuring your website provides high quality, useful and informative content is also essential for a positive user experience. Within our Hangout Notes we cover insights from Google around how they determine a quality website, with recommendations for ensuring your site provides quality content for users.
Current Sitewide Quality Score Affects All Pages
The Google sitewide quality score is applied to all pages as it is now, and not applied to pages and set when they are created.
Google Doesn’t Have a Sitewide Authority Score
Google doesn’t measure quality at a site level.
Parked Domains Lose Authority
If a domain is dropped for a period of time, John is suggesting the authority ranking signals may be lost.
Overstuffed Text will be ignored
If you overuse the same text too much on a page, including in links, then Google may consider it keyword stuffing and choose to ignore it.
Content Position Doesn’t Contribute to Weighting
John seems to be confirming that the position of content on a page doesn’t impact the weight, but they do treat hidden or visibly small content as less relevant.
External Links do Add Contextual Information But Don’t Improve Quality
External links do provide some additional information about the page, but having links themselves won’t improve the quality of a page.
Don’t Disavow Links to Old Content
You don’t need to disavow links for old content which is no longer on the site, you should only do it for links from low quality sites.
Links Impact Page Quality
Links on a page can improve the quality of a page, but they are not directly measured as a ranking signal.
New Pages Are Ranked Higher to Gather Signals
New pages are sometimes shown in search results and given an opportunity to perform, which may change when they gain more ranking signals.
Affiliate Sites are OK
Google doesn’t dislike affiliate monetised sites, provided they are good quality sites with some original content.