Comments on: Why Quality Always Wins Out in Google’s Eyes

By: Tina

Tina — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:00:18 +0000

…..And if you are still looking for the quality things. Why the duplicate content writers are still on top…? I agree, the content is a king for the better serps, But google is genous big time…Round way..The more you work the higher…For both parties perhaps?

By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:42:50 +0000

1. I did not know about “voluntary quality raters”.

2. Analytics: I saw my homepage jump to first on Google for one of my most important keywords shortly after installing the Analytics script on all of my site pages. My site has been in existence less than two years and beat out one with over ten thousand inbound links that has been around for ten years. Perhaps this is anecdotal evidence for your assertion that Analytics data is factored in SERP rankings.

Once again, I’m learning something on your site that I have not seen or heard anywhere else.

Thanks!

By: Paul Montwill

Paul Montwill — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:26:57 +0000

The human element is even getting bigger with the growing number of Google Apps and groups of friends on diggs etc. helping to promote their projects (digg has ban many users for that).

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:21:39 +0000

Geoff,

Thanks for your comment. I am glad that enjoyed the post.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:20:28 +0000

Dink,
Thanks for your compliments and comment. I agree that there is some really clever spam that is hard to detect, but remember that you only need motivated competitors to report you. I know that for a fact.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:06:10 +0000

There have been lots of articles on why content is king. This one, however, is a great look at some elements that get overlooked: the human elements. Nice, fresh take on a subject I thought was exhausted long ago.

By: Paul Montwill

Paul Montwill — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:11:53 +0000

Hamlet, thanks for mentioning FeedFlare. I installed FeedBurner on my website and I can see the number of subscribers growing. I would like to utilise this so I will investigate FeedFlare. Interaction is the king!
And one more thing, the more I read about Google, the more I can’t imaging how complex this whole search engines are and the amount of data and factors they calculate is just unbelievable!!
SERP = visitors x Google applications used x millions of factors most SEO are aware of x millions of other factors we have no idea about

By: Dink

Dink — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:17:46 +0000

I agree with you. SPAM will always be there. SPAM is easy to identify for humans but not for machines.

As a spammer, I can tell you that not all spam is as easily identified as you may think.

The WWW is truly world wide. A large (and growing) number of webmasters are not native English speakers. The great content they create often doesn’t read the same as that written by those whose native tongue is English.

I do agree that spam will always be there. As long as an important portion of our content discovery is tied to a search engine, we’ll be there to game it.

BTW…nice blog.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:30:57 +0000

Do you know of the content reader just look at on page content? Do they look at your HTML or you incoming links?

I assume you are talking about Google Reader. I think it is safe to assume the Google FeedFetcher can easily extract the links from your posts.

Other than the human editors and AI, I can’t see Google coming up with anything concrete. Everything they have ever done has been spammed.

I agree with you. SPAM will always be there. SPAM is easy to identify for humans but not for machines. Automation gives them scalability. It would be impossible to create the massive index manually, but that comes at the cost of letting spammers through.

As they employ more humans and other quality signals, they will be able to further reduce SPAM.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:17:41 +0000

do you see the influence of back-links being superseded?

Jez,

They don’t need to replace them. Links are simply another quality signal. All quality signals can be faked. The more signals they can get the better. I think they will be giving more weight to the ones that are more difficult to reproduce by spammers.

By: Mutiny Design

Mutiny Design — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:02:45 +0000

Do you know of the content reader just look at on page content? Do they look at your HTML or you incoming links?

I am not sure how successfuly Google would be able to use data collected from analytics. Although, I have thought they would be stupid not to consider using it.

If bounce rates became a big factor in ranking, I could easliy create a script to connecto to proxy servers to go to my site and browse around them. Or you could make a script to go to your competitors sites and instantlly go elsewhere.

Vist length is another ambiguous one. I could have a site, which has the purpose of getting people to phone me as quickly as possible and the visit length would be short, but the user has got what they wanted. Does that mean my site is low quality?

Social bookmarking/rating - Another good idea, but how difficult is it for me to set up a few hundered digg accounts and create a script to go an digg whatever article i send to the script?

Other than the human editors and AI, I can’t see Google coming up with anything concrete. Everything they have ever done has been spammed.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:59:27 +0000

Frank,

Thanks for your comment. Most people in the third world don’t make $10-$20, and it is definitely a lot for a college student. No wonder they have so many quality raters.;-)

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:56:56 +0000

Matt,

Thanks for your visit. I am sure they collect a lot of data from us. I think the intelligence data is helping them in many ways to improve both their organic and paid results.

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:28:52 +0000

Hafiz,

Thanks for your comment. If you are tempted to take the ‘dark path’, I guess you will have to work on many sites, trying different techniques. Hopefully some of them will work. The pros create custom tools for this purpose. That is how they don’t get discouraged.

By: AussieWebmaster

AussieWebmaster — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:22:18 +0000

The Google Army… sad thing is these guys have much more impact that the dmoz editors ever did.
And I turned down doing this a few years ago…. thought my spare time was worth more than the $10-20 an hour they were paying!!!

By: Matt Ellsworth

Matt Ellsworth — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:14:40 +0000

Great thoughts on this subject. I totally forgot about the paid content readers - I never realized that there were 10,000 of them.

I hear what you are saying about analytics and why some are worried about it. I have no idea what they do with all the data but they sure are collecting lots of it.

By: Jez

Jez — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:18:39 +0000

As more metrics are introduced, and more information is harvested directly from users do you see the influence of back-links being superseded?

By: Hafiz Rahman

Hafiz Rahman — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:07:54 +0000

Thank you very much for this post! Just by seeing the (temporary) results, it’s indeed very tempting to try using the “latest techniques” you mentioned above.

Writing quality content does take patience and perserverance. And I agree that it will be a better investment in the long run. Now the only piece of the puzzle is how to keep ourselves from getting discouraged when the temporary results aren’t as good as hoped.

Any ideas?