Will Google ever begin penalising bad English/grammar in regards to rankings and SEO?

[ExperienceOz]

Considering Google seem to be on a great crusade with all their algorithm updates to raise the overall "quality" of content on the Internet, i'm a bit concerned with their seeming lack of action towards penalising sites that contain terrible English. I'm sure you've all noticed this when you attempt to do some proper research via Google and come across an article that "looks" to be what you're after, then you click through and realise it's obviously been either put together in a rush by someone not paying attention or putting much effort in, or been outsourced for cheap labour to another country whose workers aren't (close to being) native speakers.

It's getting really old trying to make sense of articles that have completely incorrect grammar, entirely missing words, verb tenses that don't make any sense, randomly over-extravagant adjectives thrown in just as padding, etc. etc.

No offense to all those from non-native speaking countries who are attempting to make a few bucks online, but this for me is becoming by far more of an issue in terms of "quality" of information online as opposed to some of the other search issues that are being given higher priority, and it just seems strange that Google have been so blasé about it up to this point - especially given so many of these articles and pages are nothing more than outsourced filler for cheap traffic. I understand it's probably hard to code in something so advanced, but it would go a long way towards making the web a better place in my opinion.

Anyone else feeling the same way? Thoughts?

[ExperienceOz]

I agree Michael, it's a stereotype sure but most of the stuff churned out for the sake of being churned out as "fresh content" that is written in poor English simply doesn't have a use or practical function on the Internet other than a desperate attempt to soak up whatever meagre traffic they can. It's especially glaring considering their continued mantra has been "write for the user instead of the search engines" when these pages/posts are doing exactly the opposite...

[edwardrj]

Yes, true. But let's not forget Google's changes do not all come from algorithm updates. For example, the company contracts a couple of companies with thousands of independent contractors who manually review search results. And generally speaking, a lot of the lower quality sites were also riddled with poor writing, as it tends to go hand in hand with other quality issues.

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Ben, I think that's a great question and something I've wondered about as well. I think that at some point, it's likely that Google will penalise bad grammar, excessive spelling errors etc. As you say, it's probably difficult to create an algorithm for this, but the Webmaster blog post on Panda  would suggest that it's something they do think about.

It's hard to say if this will come in the form of a direct penalty or if they will rely on indirect methods. For instance, it could be argued that link authority already does this to some extent because people are less likely to link to poorly written content that they are to professionally written content.

[Wi-Phye]

God, I hope so. They have to be doing this already. I have no evidence of that but, it would seem to be an effective anti-spam measure.

If they aren't then we need to lobby for it. I bet the reality is that if they went on a grammer jihad (de-index me for that word) half the sites on the net would disappear overnight.

Guessing it's really hard to create a set of rules for this that doesn't drastically impact everything in the index.