Is bad English detected by Google
-
Hi,
I am based in the UK and in a very competitive market - van leasing - and I am thinking about using an Indian SEO company for my ongoing SEO.
They have sent me some sample artilces that they have written for link building and the English is not good.
Do you think that google can tell the difference between a well written article and a poorly written article? Will the fact that articles are poorly writtem mean we will lose potential value from the link?
Any input would be much appreciated.
Regards
John J
-
Thanks for the responses. I think I will stay away from the Indian SEO companies.
It really was for link building and not onsite stuff but it still does not seem like the best way forward.
Regards
John
-
Matt Cutts has stated in the past that poorly translating pages into another language (i.e. dumping out a raw translation) could get you devalued. Now, he's talking primarily about duplicate content but it seems that he's hinting that poor grammar could also play a role in evaluations. At the bare minimum, it could affect your bounce rate, a known SEO factor.
Let's put aside the SEO role for a second. I'm a customer who just found your site, written by your India firm. The grammar looks worse than my daughter's (she's in first grade) and is a chore to read, let alone understand. Am I going to stay and listen to/buy anything else on your site? Nope. I'll go to your competitor or I'll just give up. And you can forget any tertiary SEO benefit of my linking your article except to ridicule it. From a business standpoint it doesn't make sense. It's sloppy and people hate sloppy (unless you're selling really good hamburgers, which you're not).
If you still don't think it's important, check out Engrish. I hope you don't wind up there!
-
I agree w/ @kevinb. Google & Bing track results like high user engagement, low bounce rates, etc. Check out the infographic below.
If these articles aren't useful to users, Google will notice.
-
Awkward syntax and poor or incorrect use of idiom erect roadblocks to the flow of a narrative, depreciating the user experience.
It's been my experience that when a writer attempts to replicate a particular cultural context that is not natural to him or her, the user will recognize its artificiality—even if only on a subconscious level. An analogy would be a motion picture with dubbed—rather than subtitled—dialog: There's something that's just off.
According to Google user experience trumps, doesn't it? (See, I used an idiom right there!) So, for what its worth my advice would be to stay away.
-
Even if Google can't detect poor English now, it will be working towards it.
Surely your money is better spent elsewhere. Invest in the long term.
If the articles they are writing for you are low quality, you can bet the sites they are able to get them on are low too.
Keep away from them and work on quality. Nothing is quick and easy and that's how it should be. If people could so easily buy their way to the top, the search results wouldn't be worth using.
-
Do yourself a favour, stay away from this out-dated and damaging technique!
Create some amazing content on your own site/blog......examples could be how to reduce insurance costs when leasing a van or the best vans to hire for home removals etc etc.
Make your content the go to source for that particular problem then start contacting other webmasters of similar (non-competitor) sites to share/link so their readers benefit!
The game has changed a lot from when you could buy 50 articles from Indian SEO firms for less than £20 and churn out for links from low quality sites!
-
Wesley & Jesse hit the nail on the head. Don't do it. Even if Google possible can't detect it directly, they can spot it indirectly in the means of user experience.
Is the only reason you are using this team is price?
-
I'm not sure if Google if able to tell the difference between good or bad English at this moment.
But i do know that this is one of the criteria which they want a website to rank as is described in this document about Google Panda: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.htmlThis method is not permitted though and you may have a benefit for this on the short term, but i can tell you that it won't be long before you will get a penalty for this technique. Link building is not about buying links in any form. It's about creating awesome content that people want to share just because they think it is awesome.
Of course reaching out to people is also part of the process. But the key is always to make sure that you have to create a site that people **want **to link to because it is awesome of because their website will get better from it because your website offers great value to their visitors.
Always keep this in mind
-
What Google definitely does recognize is the exact services you are considering. Google's webspam team developed Penguin specifically to target sites that have subbed out SEO to blackhat organizations. What you are describing is exactly what they are targeting.
Don't do it! You WILL be sorry.
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
-
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs0 -
Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop
in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates). since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings. We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages. we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80). we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions. we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content. we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords. We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower. 1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at. 2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice. 3. we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building? Advice is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
When you get a new inbound link do you submit a request to google to reindex the new page pointing at you?
I'm just starting my link building campaign in earnest, and received my first good quality inbound link less than an hour ago. My initial thought was that I should go directly to google, and ask them to reindex the page that linked to me... If I make a habit of that (getting a new link, then submitting that page directly to google), would that signify to google that this might not be a natural link building campaign? The links are from legitimate (non-paid, non-exchange) partners, which google could probably figure out, but I'm interested to know opinions on this. Thanks, -Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ForForce0 -
How does Google decide what content is "similar" or "duplicate"?
Hello all, I have a massive duplicate content issue at the moment with a load of old employer detail pages on my site. We have 18,000 pages that look like this: http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=26626 http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=36986 and Google is classing all of these pages as similar content which may result in a bunch of these pages being de-indexed. Now although they all look rubbish, some of them are ranking on search engines, and looking at the traffic on a couple of these, it's clear that people who find these pages are wanting to find out more information on the school (because everyone seems to click on the local information tab on the page). So I don't want to just get rid of all these pages, I want to add content to them. But my question is... If I were to make up say 5 templates of generic content with different fields being replaced with the schools name, location, headteachers name so that they vary with other pages, will this be enough for Google to realise that they are not similar pages and will no longer class them as duplicate pages? e.g. [School name] is a busy and dynamic school led by [headteachers name] who achieve excellence every year from ofsted. Located in [location], [school name] offers a wide range of experiences both in the classroom and through extra-curricular activities, we encourage all of our pupils to “Aim Higher". We value all our teachers and support staff and work hard to keep [school name]'s reputation to the highest standards. Something like that... Anyone know if Google would slap me if I did that across 18,000 pages (with 4 other templates to choose from)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Finding and Removing bad backlinks
Ok here goes. Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder. 1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile. 2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it? 3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links? 4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing? My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed? I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake. Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | k9byron0 -
Is it bad to no follow all External LInks at the same time?
I am working on more than 40 EMDs. They are good quality brand sites but they all are interlinked to each other through footer links, side bar links. (and they dont have much of linking root domains) Now Some of those sites have been renovated with new templates and these new sites has very few external links (links going out to our own sites) but some of these old sites has 100s of external links (all these external links of course link to our own sites). But anyways, we are planning to no follow all those external links (links that are linking to our own sites) slowly to avoid penalty? question is, can it be bad to implement no follow to all those links on those sites at the same time?Will Google see it as something fishy? (I don't think so) Also, Is it good strategy to no follow all of them? (I think it is) What you guys think ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Why is this ranking first in Google Places for this term....?
"Best Bar In Chicago" - http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar+in+chicago They have only 5 Google reviews, and their local directory reviews are suspect. One of them goes to rateclubs.com and it's not even a page for their business, while one of them doesn't have user reviews, it's just an editorial review. The other one at superpages.com doesn't even link back to their site, it links to their restaurants.com profile. What is going on here? I've been trying to figure this out for a while as their first place ranking has been solidified for quite some time now. I can also tell you that a few of the bars listed below them have a MUCH higher profile and are better known. You can see that just by the reviews.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Can you set up a Google Local account under a PO Box?
I have a client that wants a Google local listing in a town he serves but does not have a physical location. Is it an issue to share an address with an existing company? Is is it better to use a P.O. Box? or is there a forwarding address company? Is this considered a black hat Local SEO tactic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BonsaiMediaGroup0