14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a lot of talk about Google's Panda algorithm update which rolled out earlier this year. Plenty of websites were affected, but plenty more don't really know, for many, SEO has more to do with mysticism than with science.
So a change that affected some 12 percent of the search results is going to get a lot of attention.
"Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year," Amit Singhal, Google's head of search quality, wrote.
"In fact, since we launched Panda, we've rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms," he said.
The aim of the Panda update was to cut down on poor quality content in the search results, mostly from what are called "content farms," websites that produce a lot of content based more on how it will rank rather than how useful it is to the users.
But some smaller websites were caught in the fishnet as well and Google is now offering more, though rather non-specific, info for those affected.
"Our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find 'high-quality' sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content. The recent 'Panda' change tackles the difficult task of algorithmically assessing website quality," Singhal explained.
In order to give a better understanding of how to be qualified as a "high quality" site, or rather how not be labeled as a poor quality by Google, Singhal provided some details into how Google engineers design the ranking algorithms.
"Of course, we aren't disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don't want folks to game our search results," he explained.
He listed a series of questions website owners should be asking themselves. It's an interesting list since it covers different areas and don't only address poor quality sites.
Some questions are obvious such as "Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature," or "Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors."
But there are some interesting ones as well such as "Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book," or "Does the article describe both sides of a story."
There are actually only a few themes in the questions and they're not anything that surprising. One area that Google looks at is the quality of the article itself, not necessarily the content but how well it's written, meaning spelling, editing and so on.
The websites themselves are a good indicator, an abundance of ads, short articles, topics spread out over many pages and so on is not a good idea. The website's reputation also plays a role, an authoritative site on a certain topic is going to rank better than sites that try to cover everything.
Finally, the quality of the content itself is also important, thorough analysis and original ideas are preferred. Of course, how good is the Google algorithm at determining if a subject is discussed properly is an open question.