What Makes a Site Good in Google’s Eyes

Posted by kevin 14 years ago

Back in Feb/Mar Google made a rather major change to the way they rank websites in their search engine results. Our dealer client sites were not really affected by the change, but the factors that Google looks at to see if a site passes muster give some indication of overall what Google feels is important when ranking websites and pages.

Below are the primary factors and what I find interesting is it comes down to fresh and relevant content. If we can continue to find ways to get new content and keep dealer sites ‘fresh’ then we’ll be in great shape.

Here is the list taken from a blog post on WordTracker.com.

Google likes to keep these things secret but the two engineers at the heart of Panda, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, gave us some strong clues in an interview with Wired.
Cutts and Singhal revealed their process which I’ll summarize as:

Conduct qualitative research (that’s speaking with individuals and not a big questionnaire) to find out which of a sample of sites they considered to be low quality and why.

Use the results to define low quality sites with the factors that Google can measure. This gives Google a mathematical definition of low quality.

If we start here, we can think of a number of factors that Google might be able to measure to define low quality, including:

A high % of duplicate content. This might apply to a page, a site or both. If it’s a site measure then that might contribute to each page’s evaluation.
A low amount of original content on a page or site.
A high % (or number) of pages with a low amount of original content.
A high amount of inappropriate (they don’t match the search queries a page does well for) adverts, especially high on the page.
Page content (and page title tag) not matching the search queries a page does well for.
Unnatural language on a page including heavy-handed on-page SEO (‘over-optimization’ to use a common oxymoron). Eg unnatural overuse of a word on a page.
High bounce rate on page or site.
Low visit times on page or site.
Low % of users returning to a site.
Low clickthrough % from Google’s results pages (for page or site).
High % of boilerplate content (the same on every page).
Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site (by count or %).
Low or no mentions or links to a page or site in social media and from other sites.