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.
Sites With Q&A Content Should Diversify Their Content Offering
Sites that provide content with one answer should think about how they can diversify their content so visitors don’t leave after finding the answer. Don’t rely on Q&A content to be visible in search because it can be hard to differentiate the content from other sites that also provide the same answer.
Sites Reliant on UGC Should be Mindful of Content Quality Across Site
Sites with a strong focus on user-generated content can struggle to maintain a high quality of content across the site.
Google Considered Adding Quality Meter to GSC
Google have looked into adding a quality meter in Search Console showing how relevant your site is in search. However, this is essentially no different to how your site is already being ranked in search because Google is trying to reflect how relevant a site is for any given query.
The March 7th Algorithm Update Was About Relevance Rather Than Quality
The March 7th update was around relevance, so ranking losses won’t have been about a site’s quality but how relevant it actually is for the search queries it ranks for. John recommends getting objective user feedback on how you can better serve them.
Quality is Assessed Differently for Featured Snippets & Rich Snippets
Quality is assessed in a different way for featured snippets and rich snippets. So your site can be showing for rich snippets but not featured snippets, and the other way around.
Overall Site Quality is Only Judged by Looking at Indexed Pages
Google only looks at the indexed pages when assessing overall site quality, so noindexed pages won’t reduce your site’s quality.
Low Quality Page Signals Aren’t Kept if Page is Blocked From Crawling
Negative signals from a low quality page aren’t kept within the site if Google has been blocked from crawling it. When the page is dropped from the index the site will be re-evaluated as it is continuously being crawled.
High Quality Sites Are Prioritised When Using Submit To Index Feature
Higher quality sites can be given preference over low quality sites when using the Submit to Index feature.
Conduct User Studies to Improve Page Quality and UX
If all efforts have been made to improve page quality then John suggests running a user study to get people to run through common tasks. From that feedback, you can learn where users struggle on a specific page and how you can fix it.
Severe SERP Fluctuations Indicate Page on Edge of Being Useful in Google’s Eyes
Wildly fluctuating rankings could be the result of algorithms judging page quality as being on the edge of being thought of as useful by Google. John recommends making a concerted effort to improve page quality to avoid this volatility.