Elements of a Quality Article
-
In your opinion, what are the signals Google uses to judge the quality of an article or post?
Here are some of my ideas:
- Reactions:
- Comment history
- Sharing (Twitter / FB / Social Bookmarks...etc)
- Citations / Mentions / Pingbacks
- Word count
- Content (Topical and qualitative analytsis, uniqueness)
- Domain (Qualitative analysis of domain article is published on)
- Use of images and media
- Use of references
- Timeliness (News, current affairs)
- Presence of date of publishing
- Spam filters:
- Anchor text usage
- Number, type and relation of outgoing links
- Content (Topical, semantic, qualitative analysis including keyword usage)
- Author data:
- Presence of author name
- Connection / link to author profile (hyperlink, rel tag, meta)
- Reputation of author (prior content, domains published and reactions)
Looking forward to your contributions.
- Reactions:
-
Try the keyword research tool for google adwords.
-
Pretty much if you follow advice from this page you can't go wrong. As far as I know there isn't a "content comprehensiveness tool" out there (yet).
-
So this is a tool or a way that we can determine how to make the article comprehensive enough based on a certain topic? I know I want to write about widgets but is there a tool that can tell me I should write about blue widgets to get better results?
-
Yes, I forgot about that post. These rules became guidelines for my team as soon as they were launched. They fail to provide specific technical guidance however. For example "Would you trust this information?" - how does Google figure that out? Surely there are algorithmic signals involved.
-
Just in case some people aren't familiar with Google's recent post about high quality sites, I'll throw that into the mix. I've edited the list, and selected things that focus more on an individual article than the site itself.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
-
For a single word query, I believe that google wants an article in the #1 position that is the first document that a person should read about that subject. That article should be comprehensive.
-
I like this. It makes so much sense and Google does have the data to put the criteria together.
-
Is the content comprehensive?
If you are writing an article about widgets, google knows what everybody is asking about them.... people want to know about brass widgets, the cost of widgets, widget inventor, the first widget, number of widgets made annually.... google knows this from search queries.
If you are trying to rank for the word "widgets" google could assess your article and determine if you are comprehensive - that means you are addressing all of the subjects that everybody is asking about - or at least the ones that are most frequently asked about.
Incorporating this into your writing has many benefits. One is that you have what visitors want to know and second it puts your page into relevancy for lots of long tail queries.
Anybody can write an article about widgets... but the savvy writer knows what people want to know about them and has the expertise to address all of those details.
-
In addition to visitor "Reactions", I would like to think that visitor "Interactions" are important.
Google might be able to collect "interactions" information from the SERPs logs, Google Toolbar and Chrome browser to determine... just speculating....
--- how long a visitor stays on the page
--- how much a visitor scrolls
--- does the visitor click
--- does the visitor print or bookmark
I don't know if these are used or if google can even detect them. However, I think that they would be valuable information for determining content qualilty or at least how much visitors interact with it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article. I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that. Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive. I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com0 -
How/when do you trim your article pages?
Hi all, I wanted to ask what have you all done to your article section that has made a difference to the site's SEO performance? What's the criteria for deciding which articles top cut or 301 redirect to the main page For example: 1. you have a slightly irrelevant article to your website topic, low conversions, but a lot of quality links to page, but no primary keywords in article title. 2. You have a slightly irrelevant article to your website, low conversion, but a lot of quality links AND you have your site's primary keywords in article title 3. You have a relevant topic to the site, but low engagement and low conversions Thanks for all your help!
On-Page Optimization | | SDavis111 -
Would you Consider this High Quality?
Hello, I have a wordpress website that i have updated with a lot of content about the products i sell. Some of the pages link back to my ecommerce website (all links are targeted at the proper/related page). I put a lot of time and effort into creating the content and providing all of the information that i think users or consumers would find useful, but the site doesn't rank at all. I'm wondering what your opinions are as to why this is not being shown in the serps. The URL is http://goo.gl/Qz5jSQ All opinions welcome. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
Why Isnt My New Article Indexed?
I posted this article last night: http://www.londontri.com/325/tomtom-runner-gps-watch-review It didn't appear in Google's index this morning despite me pointing a few high quality links to it (not keyword optimized links, just links from high quality forum posts) On closer examination I thought that the problem could be due to a keyword stuffing penalty so I have made sure that I am not repeating too many words/word combinations using a keyword density checker but the article is still not indexed. Any ideas what could be going on?
On-Page Optimization | | ross88guy0 -
Articles URL
Hello, Currently, I am parsing article base on article ID on URL request. For example:
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
To go to the content of article **What is the visa on arrival? How to get it? **I am using URL like that http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it--245.html and base on ID 245 to get this page content.
But, now I want to optimize this URL to http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it.html. Then I got a problem: How to get an article without ID? Thanks,0 -
Wordpress Title Element tag too long?
So apparently when I add the name of the blog within Wordpress, the name of the blog shows up after the the main title of each blog post and page. So trying to keep the title element >70 characters, how does one name the Wordpress blog as mine is/was: Lake Tahoe wedding photographer / Heidi Huber Photography and keep that only on the intro page and leave each page of the blog and the titles of the blog posts to not have "Lake Tahoe wedding photographer added to the end of the Title Element? Anyone have any idea? I also had gone in at one point and updated every single Title on each page/post using Yoast's SEO and the SEOMOZ crawl is still coming up with over 216 caution errors for the title page. Thank you so much for any advice! Heidi
On-Page Optimization | | hmhuber0 -
How serious an issue is Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)?
Hi, We have about 3000 of these, how serious an issue is this considered? Is it simply the fact that Google won't index the keywords if they are over 70 characters? Could we strip out common words here: 50 Worship Ideas for Small Groups by Stuart Townend | World of Books.com Like 'for', 'by' and probably the '.com'?
On-Page Optimization | | Benj250 -
Site structure for services and blog articles
Hi, looking for some advice on the structure for a relatively small site (around 200 pages). I'd like a structure where we can talk about our services as well as write blog articles on topics that relate to our services. We'll have loads more content in the blog area than in the services area. I was thinking of this: option 1: /services /services/copywriting
On-Page Optimization | | JaspalX
/services/social-media
/services/press-releases etc. and categories for articles where we'd give tips, talk about trends etc. /copywriting
/social-media
/effective-press-releases
etc. would it be better to have a different structure, say: option 2: /copywriting
/copywriting/services
/copywriting/articles OR option 3: /copywriting-services
/copywriting-blog OR option 4: /services/copywriting
/blog/copywriting OR is there another, better way perhaps? Of course the internal anchor text links to the services/blog articles pages will be tuned to try and make it clear what each section is about i.e. our services vs. industry trends/comments/tips for the blog.0