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.
New Pages Inherit Site Authority
Google uses existing knowledge of a website when ranking new pages from that site.
Expired Content Can be Redirected
Even if a page has been unavailable for some time, then you can still redirect URLs to pass on the authority.
Rich Snippets Need to Be Correct, Relevant, and on Quality Pages
In order for rich snippets to be displayed in organic search results, they need to be implemented correctly, relevant to the content and on quality pages.
Crawl Errors are not a Quality Metric
Google considers crawl errors to be technical response, and aren’t considered a quality metric which would impact rankings.
Rich Snippets Won’t be Displayed for Low Quality Pages
Structured markup has to be technially correct, and they are accepted from a policy, and also meet quality criteria to be displayed. If you do a site: command for a URL, and can see the markup appearing, but it doesn’t appear for regular searches, it means the markup has been implemented successfully but the page does not meet the quality criteria.
Valid HTML Isn’t a Ranking Factor
Vaild HTML isn’t a ranking factor. If it works in the browser, and Google can understand the content then it’s OK.
Category Pages Require Unique Content
For category listing pages the pages shouldn’t be completely automated, and should have some unique content, but the page quality is the most important thing.
Reconsideration Requests Don’t Work for Algorithmic Penalties
Reconsideration requests can’t be made for algorithmic penalties like Panda and Penguin. You need to do is disavow the links, or fix the quality issues for the penalty to be lifted in time.
Click Behaviour is Used to Improve Google’s algorithm
The interaction with search results is used to measure search results quality. The more clicking around, the worse the search results page. John says it’s not calculated per query, but it used to assess their different algorithms over large numbers of searches.