Google provides guidance on building high-quality websites

Following on from our article in the April newsletter about Google’s changes to its ranking algorithm and how it could affect the ranking of some websites, this month we focus upon on recent blog post by Google, which outlines some of the key elements that they consider as best practice for building high quality web sites.

Google states that the introduction of the so-called ‘Panda’ algorithm change is only one of approximately 500 search improvements it expects to roll out to search this year and thus shouldn’t be the primary consideration when building a quality website. Instead, the main focus should be upon providing users with the best possible experience though quality content, (rather than trying to optimise for any particular Google algorithm), as it’s this element that determines the high and low-quality sites and thus the associated rankings.

However, if your website has been impacted by the recent ranking changes, Google provides some useful guidelines about how they identify high-quality content in a recent blog post for webmasters. An important factor is the level of a website’s or author’s authority and neutrality about a topic or article, which in turn leads to the level of trust that users place in it. Also, the degree of comprehensiveness, depth, helpfulness, originality of an article and how unique it is, can provide some indication of the value it provides compared with other search results.

The quality control of a site’s content is another important factor, as content produced with little care would be penalised. Inaccurate editing would be deemed as low-quality, particularly if content contains spelling, grammatical and factual errors. It would meet this factor’s criteria if it were of high enough quality that it could be printed in a magazine or book and encourages a user to bookmark it. Content that invokes any complaints from users would be deemed to be low quality, as would sites that users think would be too insecure to feel safe enough to enter their credit card numbers.

If a website’s content has been manipulated purely for ranking purposes, such as being replicated across the site with keyword variations, this would actually hinder, rather than improve its ranking. It must be remembered that Google is making these changes automatically, based in signals they have identified from sites they deem high or low quality, and although the system can never be perfect, they hope that the quality of results being presented has improved following these changes.

So with the introduction of the Panda algorithm and the other on-going search improvements, it’s clear that Google is tackling the problem of low-quality sites that are built purely to rank well. It wants to promote high-quality sites that have minimal duplicate content, are knowledgeable, accurate, well-written, informative and concise, as this will benefit the user.

You can read more in Google’s blog post or if you’d like any more information about best practices for building high-quality websites, or how Google’s changes could affect the ranking of your website, contact us now for details.

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