What are the factors Google considers when weighing whether a page is high or low quality, and how can you identify those pages yourself? There's a laundry list of things to examine to determine which pages make the grade and which don't, from searcher behavior to page load times to spelling mistakes. Rand covers it all in this episode of Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to figure out if Google thinks a page on a website is potentially low quality and if that could lead us to some optimization options.
So as we've talked about previously here on Whiteboard Friday, and I'm sure many of you have been following along with experiments that Britney Muller from Moz has been conducting about removing low-quality pages, you saw Roy Hinkis from SimilarWeb talk about how they had removed low-quality pages from their site and seen an increase in rankings on a bunch of stuff. So many people have been trying this tactic. The challenge is figuring out which pages are actually low quality. What does that constitute?
What constitutes "quality" for Google?
So Google has some ideas about what's high quality versus low quality, and a few of those are pretty obvious and we're familiar with, and some of them may be more intriguing. So...- Google wants unique content.
- They want to make sure that the value to searchers from that content is actually unique, not that it's just different words and phrases on the page, but the value provided is actually different. You can check out the Whiteboard Friday on unique value if you have more questions on that.
- They like to see lots of external sources linking editorially to a page. That tells them that the page is probably high quality because it's reference-worthy.
- They also like to see high-quality pages, not just sources, domains but high-quality pages linking to this. That can be internal and external links. So it tends to be the case that if your high-quality pages on your website link to another page on your site, Google often interprets that that way.
- The page successfully answers the searcher's query.
This is an intriguing one. So if someone performs a search, let's say here I type in a search on Google for "pressure washing." I'll just write "pressure wash." This page comes up. Someone clicks on that page, and they stay here and maybe they do go back to Google, but then they perform a completely different search, or they go to a different task, they visit a different website, they go back to their email, whatever it is. That tells Google, great, this page solved the query.
If instead someone searches for this and they go, they perform the search, they click on a link, and they get a low-quality mumbo-jumbo page and they click back and they choose a different result instead, that tells Google that page did not successfully answer that searcher's query. If this happens a lot, Google calls this activity pogo-sticking, where you visit this one, it didn't answer your query, so you go visit another one that does. It's very likely that this result will be moved down and be perceived as low quality in Google.
- The page has got to load fast on any connection.
- They want to see high-quality accessibility with intuitive user experience and design on any device, so mobile, desktop, tablet, laptop.
- They want to see actually grammatically correct and well-spelled content. I know this may come as a surprise, but we've actually done some tests and seen that by having poor spelling or bad grammar, we can get featured snippets removed from Google. So you can have a featured snippet, it's doing great in the SERPs, you change something in there, you mess it up, and Google says, "Wait, no, that no longer qualifies. You are no longer a high-quality answer." So that tells us that they are analyzing pages for that type of information.
- Non-text content needs to have text alternatives. This is why Google encourages use of the alt attribute. This is why on videos they like transcripts. Here on Whiteboard Friday, as I'm speaking, there's a transcript down below this video that you can read and get all the content without having to listen to me if you don't want to or if you don't have the ability to for whatever technical or accessibility, handicapped reasons.
- They also like to see content that is well-organized and easy to consume and understand. They interpret that through a bunch of different things, but some of their machine learning systems can certainly pick that up.
- Then they like to see content that points to additional sources for more information or for follow-up on tasks or to cite sources. So links externally from a page will do that.
This is not an exhaustive list. But these are some of the things that can tell Google high quality versus low quality and start to get them filtering things.
How can SEOs & marketers filter pages on sites to ID high vs. low quality?
As a marketer, as an SEO, there's a process that we can use. We don't have access to every single one of these components that Google can measure, but we can look at some things that will help us determine this is high quality, this is low quality, maybe I should try deleting or removing this from my site or recreating it if it is low quality.
In general, I'm going to urge you NOT to use things like:
A. Time on site, raw time on site
B. Raw bounce rate
C. Organic visits
D. Assisted conversions
Why not? Because by themselves, all of these can be misleading signals.
So a long time on your website could be because someone's very engaged with your content. It could also be because someone is immensely frustrated and they cannot find what they need. So they're going to return to the search result and click something else that quickly answers their query in an accessible fashion. Maybe you have lots of pop-ups and they have to click close on them and it's hard to find the x-button and they have to scroll down far in your content. So they're very unhappy with your result.
Bounce rate works similarly. A high bounce rate could be a fine thing if you're answering a very simple query or if the next step is to go somewhere else or if there is no next step. If I'm just trying to get, "Hey, I need some pressure washing tips for this kind of treated wood, and I need to know whether I'll remove the treatment if I pressure wash the wood at this level of pressure," and it turns out no, I'm good. Great. Thank you. I'm all done. I don't need to visit your website anymore. My bounce rate was very, very high. Maybe you have a bounce rate in the 80s or 90s percent, but you've answered the searcher's query. You've done what Google wants. So bounce rate by itself, bad metric.
Same with organic visits. You could have a page that is relatively low quality that receives a good amount of organic traffic for one reason or another, and that could be because it's still ranking for something or because it ranks for a bunch of long tail stuff, but it is disappointing searchers. This one is a little bit better in the longer term. If you look at this over the course of weeks or months as opposed to just days, you can generally get a better sense, but still, by itself, I don't love it.
Assisted conversions is a great example. This page might not convert anyone. It may be an opportunity to drop cookies. It might be an opportunity to remarket or retarget to someone or get them to sign up for an email list, but it may not convert directly into whatever goal conversions you've got. That doesn't mean it's low-quality content.
THESE can be a good start:
So what I'm going to urge you to do is think of these as a combination of metrics. Any time you're analyzing for low versus high quality, have a combination of metrics approach that you're applying.
1. That could be a combination of engagement metrics. I'm going to look at...
- Total visits
- External and internal
- I'm going to look at the pages per visit after landing. So if someone gets to the page and then they browse through other pages on the site, that is a good sign. If they browse through very few, not as good a sign, but not to be taken by itself. It needs to be combined with things like time on site and bounce rate and total visits and external visits.
2. You can combine some offsite metrics. So things like...
- External links
- Number of linking root domains
- PA and your social shares like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn share counts, those can also be applicable here. If you see something that's getting social shares, well, maybe it doesn't match up with searchers' needs, but it could still be high-quality content.
3. Search engine metrics. You can look at...
- Indexation by typing a URL directly into the search bar or the browser bar and seeing whether the page is indexed.
- You can also look at things that rank for their own title.
- You can look in Google Search Console and see click-through rates.
- You can look at unique versus duplicate content. So if I type in a URL here and I see multiple pages come back from my site, or if I type in the title of a page that I've created and I see multiple URLs come back from my own website, I know that there's some uniqueness problems there.
4. You are almost definitely going to want to do an actual hand review of a handful of pages.
- Pages from subsections or subfolders or subdomains, if you have them, and say, "Oh, hang on. Does this actually help searchers? Is this content current and up to date? Is it meeting our organization's standards?"
Make 3 buckets:
Using these combinations of metrics, you can build some buckets. You can do this in a pretty easy way by exporting all your URLs. You could use something like Screaming Frog or Moz's crawler or DeepCrawl, and you can export all your pages into a spreadsheet with metrics like these, and then you can start to sort and filter. You can create some sort of algorithm, some combination of the metrics that you determine is pretty good at ID'ing things, and you double-check that with your hand review. I'm going to urge you to put them into three kinds of buckets.
I. High importance. So high importance, high-quality content, you're going to keep that stuff.
II. Needs work. second is actually stuff that needs work but is still good enough to stay in the search engines. It's not awful. It's not harming your brand, and it's certainly not what search engines would call low quality and be penalizing you for. It's just not living up to your expectations or your hopes. That means you can republish it or work on it and improve it.
III. Low quality. It really doesn't meet the standards that you've got here, but don't just delete them outright. Do some testing. Take a sample set of the worst junk that you put in the low bucket, remove it from your site, make sure you keep a copy, and see if by removing a few hundred or a few thousand of those pages, you see an increase in crawl budget and indexation and rankings and search traffic. If so, you can start to be more or less judicious and more liberal with what you're cutting out of that low-quality bucket and a lot of times see some great results from Google.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
I´m nobody to be able to argue with you Rand, but i think Google still need lots of iprovements to know what contents are good quality, i´m not saying not doing good job but still give results, at leats in spanish where only prime the long or amount of words before a really good content.
I hate to agree, but it seems that content quality only works for English content. I can see really bad spelling, long posts and websites not updated for the past 7 years go ahead of unique good quality content for Spanish and Dutch languages. It also seems that domain age counts a lot for ranking higher.
Google is not the only company that takes no mind about other languages. Sadly this is something that happens with a lot of US/UK companies. In the company I work, we own a booking engine and our English content is displayed perfectly, resizes well, everything fits etc. When you change to another language with special characters, longer sentences etc, all the bad stuff comes to light.
Actually, I agree here too. Google's algorithms tend to be more sophisticated in English than in other languages, and it often takes a few years before what they do in English and for .com catches up to other geographies. Definitely a frustration.
I can tell cases like if you look for the search "como hacer un pantallazo en windows 10" in english: "how to do a screenshot in windows 10", i last 10 minutes reading the article in first position and i still don´t know how to do the screenshot. Very true :)
I've to agree with you too. It's specially frustrating to see that the first positions are still gaming the algorithm, at least in Spanish. However I've the feeling that it's getting better lately. We can expect this to be "fixed" anytime soon. I hope!
Totally agree. I think Google with improve other languages processing and will rank every page as it deserves....
Yes I'm spanish speaker, I work on both spanish and english projects, and trust me when I say that try to rank a spanish website is 10 times easier compared with the english version of the same website.
Completely agree, we have a project working in Spain and Uk/ Ireland, it's so much different that it seems a different project.
Ich think Google is also pretty God in German. A Lot of languages are frustrating for Sure. Sorry for my german autocorrection
Hi Rand,
I've been removing low quality content, or making it unindexable since the mid-2000s, because it didn't seem the value that you would want to provide to searchers on many pages, and doing so has kept pages from penalties or being impacted by updates from Google.
When looking at Google patents and blog posts around topics such as the Panda upgrade, it's hard to miss that they refer to sites that are intended to do well in Panda as "High Quality" Sites. In the spirit of the "More Guidance on Building High Quality Sites" questions that Amit Singhal published about the Panda update at Google, I've been finding myself asking a lot how I can improve the quality of pages that I run across instead of whether or not I should recommend that they be noindexed or deleted.
What is it that could be added to make them fulfill informational or situational needs of searchers? What is there about them that can be changed to improve their quality? Would more content be sufficient? Would some kind of interactivity be a welcome and helpful addition? Do they answer questions that people frequently ask, or cover themes that people frequently search for? How can I improve how trusted pages might be, or how authoritative or how much expertise they display? How good or bad are those pages compared to other pages on the web on similar topics (are there any others?)
What I am saying is that if "Remove" is one option, can the concept of "Replace" or "Upgrade" be too far removed. Turning what might be perceived as a weakness into a strength has some value too.
Absolutely agree Bill! In some cases, removal is the thing to do, but if you have the bandwidth and the inspiration, an upgrade can be far more rewarding in terms of traffic.
I remember working on a university site, and seeing a staff directory that was just names of the people who worked at the school. They didn't have room numbers, or contact information, or biographical information, or other content that made it more useful, and I recommended that they noindex those pages. This was back in 2005, and I remember my coworkers finding it strange that I was recommending that, because doing so didn't seem to help other pages rank higher (it did, because it wasn't wasting PageRank on valueless pages). Making that content more useful was easy to do, but it just didn't have much value the way it was; and it seemed to exist because publishing in digital ink was inexpensive, and they could publish those pages
Thanks for
these tips to know how to identify the low quality content, there are
several aspects that I did not know and I was doing wrong. With your help I will improve some pages of my website to upload quality content.
Greetings Rand
Not connected to Google's signals at all, but Yandex can be a good alternative source of data when looking into this. Yandex Webmaster has some decent tools and site diagnostic info. They outright show you which pages they don't want to index because of low quality issues. You may or may not agree with their automated assessments, but it can turn up interesting results that raise new questions and prompt further investigation.
Huh - very cool Adam! Didn't know about that, but will link to the Yandex webmaster tools here: https://webmaster.yandex.com/
Indeed, Adam, that's a great tip, thanks.
One challenge that we face for some clients is instructional/scholarly content that uses very specific and niche language, which is often not going to fit the average reader. Example page: Full-Mouth Restoration. It makes it more challenging to achieve an acceptable Readability score. I find that Google notices the difference between:
I might suggest that using structured data markup smartly can make a difference when "High Quality" and "Low Quality" in Google's Eyes (AND sales volume :)). Thoughts, Rand?
Scholar articles are indeed very niche. I guess it is not only the readability but also how readers are engaged on the page that matter. So if your article is tough to read but people are spending a lot of time on it reading, rereading, ect., commenting and so on, it could go up the ranking for those niche keywords. Why not? If it is valuable (and I bet they are.)
Solid article and breakdown on determining low quality pages Rand. We found that especially businesses that have been blogging, doing content marketing, or doing "inbound marketing" often have many blog posts or pieces of content that can either be greatly improved upon or deleted. Doing a "blog audit" often will help to determine this and the 3 Buckets approach you covered is a great way to get started.
Great post! I know I can only speak for English websites in America, but all of these tips and analysis by Rand make sense to me. Also getting links for high quality PAGES, not just high quality DOMAINS helps a ton.
Respect sir ! really useful information you provide here.
When we search something related to our digital marketing problem ( Ranking, traffic, ROI, CRO ) always we found your WBF.
Currently i am working in 2 website both have good amount of content and backlinks ( non authoritative also ) but my keyword stuck on 2nd 3rd page. i was searching on google about how google know my page have low quality or low quality content.
You share useful article for all. Really thanks and god bless you
I think you mean WBF, not WTF. Very different meaning!
Yes, I've never come across a WBF that made me go WTF. :)
Thanks for the post Rand. Brilliant as always.
We are getting into our second year of blogging and it is obvious that we need to do a lot of cleanup of old articles. A lot of the stuff that we wrote at the beginning is pretty much no good. I hope that we can refresh the articles with improved writing and on page SEO so they'll will increase in traffic.It sounds like I'll have to prune out some of the deadwood that just aren't going to be quality articles no matter how we spin them since low quality pages will bring down our overall ranking. So much to learn in the SEO world. It makes me glad that you guys are here.
Good luck with that then!
It is so good to get these type analysis rolling for the industry. Thanks for touching on this topic, Rand. I've done this, first as part of a team effort to get a site out of Panda, and then as a recurrent analysis, to keep content and overall website quality levels under control when publishers aim to go wild with content creation at scale. I consider this as one of the easiest and most effective tactics when talking about returning of effort in our SEO strategies on a medium to big size websites.
One more concept I've been playing around with is -efficiency- for content creation strategies to evaluate the progress and quality of the library. Establishing if the growth of content urls is substantially lowering the average Visits per article on a given time range and then compare it to a similar previous period, might hint organic acquisition traffic problems with the scale model and the quality of that content overall.
This tracked over time + other cohort publishing analysis and engagement metrics has proven to be very powerful when establishing quality patterns and also dividing the buckets you mention towards the end of the whiteboard.
Thanks for sharing!
Good insights as usual. I was interested by the idea proposed on the previous whiteboard that removing low quality content actually helped improve rankings for the site so it was great to see a follow-up with more info on how to analyze that
Hey Rand, If I type a URL in Google search box and I see multiple pages come back from my site but original one also ranking on the top. In this condition, is there a possibility to be any uniqueness problems?
Thanks Rand! Super helpful insights! What are your thoughts on setting up a "noindex, nofollow" configuration on a page instead of deleting it outright? Will this accomplish the same goal of removing low quality content, or do Google and other search engines want to see the content completely gone?
Thanks!
If I remember well, having too many "noindex, nofollow" pages is bad. So if you are doing it times to times and limit the number of pages, it is ok.
Then, my 2 cents is that it does not really matter whether you are deleting your page or nofollowing(???) it. What matters is that you bring value to your customers and audience. We should all focus more on our long term goals (me included.)
I've never heard of a limit on noindexing pages? I think Google's fine with even very large sets of noindex (either meta robots or via robots.txt).
I believe that is correct, Rand. I recall John Mueller saying something like no need to worry much about the length of our robots.txt file.
Thanks for the correction!
I've got a Whiteboard Friday here on crawling directives: https://moz.com/blog/controlling-search-engine-cra...
If you want to keep a page for users but don't want search engines to judge you on it, using meta robots noindex, follow is probably the way to go. I wouldn't use "nofollow" though, unless you really don't want any of that page's links to count.
As usual the whiteboard friday are a hit. Thanks Rad
I have a question, does any one knows of any tool to measure the legibility of a post, I know there are many web based tools but I'm looking for a profesional tool that can handle serveral blogs and posts.
By the way great content Rad, I hope to know you at next the Mozcon
Only one I'm familiar with is https://readable.io/text/, but I haven't used it personally and can't vouch for it.
Hi Rad, So how do you handle post like this one?
to be more specific which quality control use a site like this one, which are the rules that you follow to evaluate if an article meet your requirements...sorry if the answer looks stupid but Im learning, normally when Im optimizing a post, just follow the yoast plugins warnings. No matter if Im using lorem ipsum text or a great content, if put a link, put my keyword in the head, and meta tags and ad an image, the plugin will show me a green light. Obivosuly is just a plugin. But the truth is, Im not better that the plugin selecting which one is good or bad content.
Or where I can found information about it
Hi Rand,
I hope you can answer my questions:
1. What happens if the Title Tag and Meta Description of a page changes while the website/pages are in the sandbox/in process of ranking?
- Does it lose its Trust or Authority that was being built/developed?
2. Rewriting/Updating content on a website that is ranking in order to provide more detail solutions to reduce bounce rate does this decreases ranking of the page?
YES! Finally an expert proclaims that these newbie/rookie metrics that business owners always focus on, are'nt worth focusing on when grading quality pages!
A. Time on site, raw time on site
B. Raw bounce rate
C. Organic visits
D. Assisted conversions
Great stuff you've mentioned above, is there any connection between the expected CTR and ranking factor. If the actual CTR greater than expected CTR, will it benefit the organic ranking as well as quality score of the page?
In the process of evaluating pages, I look firstly if the traffic is increasing or dropping. If there's no traffic, the site has no value IMHO. It's like an abandoned factory - it looks like that to me.
I think this would be a good Idea for a tool on Moz Pro. The tool can analyse most of the metrics (since it will be connected with Google Analytics anyways) and tell me instantly which one of the sites needs a deeper scrutiny because of a low quality warning. What do you think Rand about this idea :-)
calltutors offering you guaranteed Google Page#1 rankings with white hat SEO services.They fully understand your requirements and happy to assist you in the promotion of your website ranking to achieve the quality leads & traffic to your website.
Very Informative post indeed.You have described everything very well.But I have a doubt which I want to ask you .Is it necessary to write detailed content even though our content " thin content" is point to point.
Thanks Rand! There's some great information here.
It's interesting to see that Google is considering spelling & grammatical errors as "low-quality" and removing error-ridden results from SERPs and snippets. It definitely makes sense for that to be taken into consideration. Do typos in the body of a post have a significant result on Google's determination of page quality, or does it matter more if there are typos in headings, meta, etc.?
Thanks Rand :-)
wooo! Hi Rankd you solved my some silly questions by giving small example that if a person comes to your site and get useful information within 30 seconds why he will visit other page. Bounce rate may be increase 70%.. 80%. I did not see any real example but I always used to think that these things have impact on your ranking.
And today an idea flick in my mind unique content means not editing any article. It means very unique for an example I am working in insurance company and found that a unique content page is doing great performance then others even that page does not have good inbound links. Great Stuff!!
Great post!
You are right that Google want unique and quality content. So we must have unique and quality content on our website.
Hi,
I am starting a Website focused on high school students where I will be uploading mostly video contents. I just wanted to know that if there any way to upload my videos first on YouTube than on my Website and it should not be counted as duplicate content by Google.
Great read. Its always interesting to know what Google is up to. Many moving targets.
Hi Rand! Thanks for the post.
Considering there is competition and good content for some KW / topic and disregarding links:
Do you believe that reaching (and staying) in the top positions of the SERPs automatically means that content is good and is serving users well?
Great article, thanks for sharing! Your "good starts" are really useful. I will surely use them to create some custom dashboards in Google Analytics.
Hey!
Thanks for the awesome posts. I was just wondering what whiteboard markers you use. Thanks!
Great post. One thing I've been worried about in the past though is if I upload a video to YouTube, and then embed that on my website with the transcript underneath the video, would Google class this as duplicate content? I'll be doing various reviews, and it makes sense to have it an a written format as well as a video. However, I don't want to get slapped by Google for doing this.
I do think, in this case, you are providing value to your audience in a different way. So it is not duplicated, it is curating. And! If Rand Fish is doing it, so we can do it as well, right?
Right! I don't think Google will consider this duplicate content in most cases, and if you publish first to your own site, and later to YouTube (which is how we do it with WB Friday), you should be able to avoid the issue.
Excellent! Thank you so much for the excellent WBF and getting back to me about that. It's much appreciated.
So... if you publish it first on YouTube then on your own website, it would be different?
Hey Rand, thanks a lot for the vid, I really found it insightful! :)
I did like one tip in particular about Google Snippet. We've seen this happen a lot when we decided to update an article which was ranked #1 for the Google Keyword, and after adding extra content, the snippet got removed. We are still waiting for it to re-appear.
Have you previously experienced cases when the snipper re-appeared for highly-ranked articles that you edited? If yes, how much did it take you? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks!
Arthur
Google is not great a UK English grammar and UK spellings and in my case I am dyslexic and having everything I want to do online proofread is not often practical or financially viable. How much of a fact is that in the test you did?
In your case, you could automatically add an introduction/attention paragraph in all your article mentionning your problem and telling your readers to not get worried (because you are improving :D or something like that.) It will create a bond with your readers. So your "problem" could become an advantage.
As always, a great whiteboard Friday! I particularly like the advice about removing low quality content from your site. I have personally see this do wonders for people's websites, but you often run into resistance because there is this fear in people that the need MORE content when the emphasis should be on QUALITY content.
I loved this so much I included it in my weekly roundup post, but honestly I've included a lot of Rand's whiteboard Fridays in my roundup posts: https://www.kateneuens.com/writing-prompts-link-building-ebook-technical-seo/
Hey Rand thanks for the insight as always. I'm curious if there are any algorithms or score calculators already in existence that could help with your last few points. I am certainly no data scientist and don't know how I would go about doing that sort of scoring on my own.
Thanks!
Jackson
And what about the long descriptions in images? Does google like that as it does on links or alts? I don´t know if i should waste my time here instead of trying other options... can anyone help me?
Remove Pages or set it to "noindex"?
¡Gran poste Rand !! Como siempre...
Abres los ojos a muchas cosas que quizás muchos de nosotros no tomamos en cuenta.
¿Alguien sabe con seguridad si Google tiene en cuenta acentos gráficos y otros símbolos como errores ortográficos?
Thanks for your article!. It caught my attention that I have seen websites that are made in html tables, are not adapted to the mobiles and these pages load slowly. But even so, they are on the first page of Google. why?
Hi Rand! Thanks for the post.
Firstly I would like to thank you for sharing this topic with us. As per Google Guidelines content is king and unique content and external links provide high quality to the webpages. This is the best point to avoid low quality.
Thanks again for sharing this topic.
Great post. Very much in agreement with the subject of the unique content and with the external links, although they are more complicated to obtain, since Google does not want that they become manuals. The points to keep in mind are important. Thanks for the post.
Great insightful post!!You said right Google want unique and quality content. So we must be require unique and quality content and also we must be care about bounce rate, Time on site and many other things..