How to protect your website’s quality score by ditching low quality content

Don’t be a victim of Google’s quality score. Find out how to quality control your content and increase your search engine rankings site-wide!

Did you know that Google Panda assigns a hidden ‘quality score’ to your domain based upon their own internal algorithm, and that this affects rankings for ALL your pages?

I know I talk a lot about quality content, but I can’t stress enough how important this is – to both your website visitors and to Google. Many websites have been impacted by Google’s recent August update and with these quality updates happening with greater frequency it’s more crucial than ever to review your content and significantly increase your quality score for the long-term.

What is the Google Panda Quality Score?

As the name would suggest, Google Panda’s Quality Score is a way of assessing how likely searchers are to find the content of a page engaging, helpful and relevant to their search. Although every page is given a unique score, Google Panda adds all of the Quality Scores together and divides them across your total number of pages to create a Quality Score for your entire domain.

This means that your Quality Score will decrease substantially for ALL of your pages in Google – downgrading the value of your best pages – if you have low quality, thin, and definitely duplicate content anywhere on your site. This can rot your site away, affecting its visibility and undermining your hard work.

The good news is that there’s a flipside to this, i.e. your Quality Score increases substantially if you are super diligent and only have valuable, higher quality pages in Google’s index. In other words, quality control your content and your rankings site-wide should increase next time Google applies their Panda algorithm, which is usually on a monthly basis.

Low quality vs. high quality content: What’s the difference?

The message is clear. If you’re committed to SEO and securing those top Google rankings, you need to be committed to producing great content and weeding out any less than stellar pages.

But what makes low quality versus high-quality content? How does Google decide? When auditing your pages, how do you determine what stays and what goes (or at least gets rewritten)?

Personally, I would define high-quality content as content that attracts audience engagement versus low-quality content as content that gets overlooked and ignored.

Google’s guidelines to quality content

Google gives plenty of advice about what it views to be quality content – it’s even covered in this Google Search Console course about creating valuable content.

It tells us that quality content is:

• Useful and informative – e.g. includes location, opening hours, contact information, prices, product or event details
• More valuable and useful than other sites – i.e. when compared to your competitors
• Credible – e.g. includes citations, links to original research, author biography, genuine reviews and testimonials
• High quality – e.g. includes unique, specific and relevant content that hasn’t been outsourced to other websites; free from spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors
• Engaging – e.g. features relevant, high quality images, opportunities to comment, social media widgets and sharing options, updates, and links to related information

Google also recommends that we steer clear of:

• Automatically generated content
• Errors such as broken links or wrong information
• Link schemes
• Cloaking and other black hat SEO practices, e.g. hidden text or links
• Grammar or spelling mistakes
• An excessive amount of ads
• Taking part in or promoting irrelevant affiliate schemes
• Spam such as comment or forum spam

To help you examine the quality of your content at a deeper, more critical level Google released some guidelines around identifying high-quality content back in 2011 and has just updated them for August 2019

These are the questions suggested by the search engine to provide a helpful steer:

CONTENT AND QUALITY QUESTIONS

• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
• Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
• Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
• Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

EXPERTISE QUESTIONS

• Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
• If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic?
• Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?
• Is the content free from easily-verified factual errors?
• Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?

PRESENTATION AND PRODUCTION QUESTIONS

• Is the content free from spelling or stylistic issues?
• Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?

COMPARATIVE QUESTIONS

• Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

Of course, these questions will only take you so far – you may simply be too close to your own web content to view it objectively. If you’re struggling to cast a critical eye over your site, you could always try asking a friend, trusted member of your network, or even some of your most loyal customers for their opinions.

Using data to assess your content

Even with different viewpoints, it can be hard to get a consensus about the quality of your content. It’s therefore helpful to regularly review the data you have at your disposal about how your content is performing. This can help you to make objective and informed decisions about what stays on your site and what goes.

• Identify your least visited pages

Google Analytics – as we explored in this two-part blog – offers a wealth of information about how pages on your website are performing. A good starting point is to log in to Google Analytics and choose Behaviour>Site content>All pages from the left-hand menu. I would suggest changing the to and from dates to cover the last three months for a more balanced overview of which pages are most and least visited.

From the data you’re given, you can see which pages have attracted very few visits (although what this number is will depend on your typical traffic volumes), as well as the pages with little to no dwell time, and/or a high bounce rate.

If you have pages that have had less than 10 visits in the past three months, no dwell time when visited or a 100% bounce rate, now is the time to review them by asking Google’s questions above.

You might find that the page needs updating or rewriting to give it a new lease of life. It could be that the page is no longer relevant and needs to be removed from your website. Just remember that if you do decide to remove a page from your website, people using its URL will not find the content they are looking for. Is the information they’re seeking available elsewhere on your website?

This helpful post from Yoast explains how to properly delete a page from your website, including how to redirect visitors to the information they need.

I would also recommend reading this post from Moz about 301 redirects.

• Identify duplicate content

The next step is to check your website for duplicate content. If you have a WordPress website, this can be a critical issue.

Although you may have just one page on your website about a particular topic – let’s use ‘SEO’ as our example – due to how WordPress works, you may have unintentionally created six different URLs that let people access that page, e.g.:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/SEO
• http://yourdomain.com/SEO
• http://yourdomain.com/tag/SEO
• http://www.yourdomain.com/tag/SEO
• http://yourdomain.com/category/SEO
• http://www.yourdomain.com/Category/SEO
• http://yourdomain23.com/SEO-post (External website)

Google will not know which URL is the most relevant and will pick one of the six, which may not be the one you want to promote, while penalising your website for duplicate content. It is therefore imperative that you check whether this issue could be affecting your site.

You can do this in several ways.

1. Go to Google and type ‘site:’ followed by your company’s web address (e.g. site:www.seo-plus.co.uk) and Google will return every URL that it has indexed for your site. It will take some time, but you need to work through the URLs to check whether any link to the same pages. With a WordPress site, you may typically find that your categories, tags, authors and archives are the root cause for any duplicate content issues.
2. Alternatively, you can identify duplicate content using a free tool such as Siteliner.
3. Log into your website’s dashboard. If you have a WordPress site and use the Yoast SEO plugin, click on the Yoast SEO Settings option and choose Titles & Metas before clicking on the Taxonomies tab (see below). Under the ‘Meta Robots’ option for Categories, Tags and Filter, change from the default ‘Index’ setting to ‘noindex’. This will stop the search engines from indexing these URLs.

Next, go to the Archives tab next to Taxonomies and make sure that your archives and authors are set to ‘noindex’ too.

Once you’ve done this, I would also recommend clicking on the Yoast SEO ‘Advanced’ option in the left-hand menu and opening the Permalinks tab. In this, select the option to redirect attachment URLs to the parent page URL and save your changed settings

1. 4. To manage the issue of duplicate content caused by multiple URLs to the same page, you should also consider applying a canonical URL tag to the web address that you do want Google to index. The canonical tag tells search engines that a particular URL is your preferred one and should be prioritised over all others. If you’re unsure how to apply the canonical tag, check out this helpful post from Yoast for the ultimate rel=canonical guide.

• Weed out poor quality blog articles

If you’re writing blog articles for SEO purposes alone, you could be doing Quality Score and rankings more harm than good. Google’s questions above suggest that the search engine seeks to weed out shallow content that doesn’t give much value to the reader, or blog articles that repeatedly target the same keywords.

If you’re featuring short ‘content mill-style’ 300-word blogs on your site riddled with variations of the same keywords, week in and week out, now is the time to cull them from your site, or re-write the content to a greater depth.

Equally, there’s no point writing long, complicated blog posts if they don’t have valuable content and are hard to read.

My advice is to forget about word count and use as many or as few words as you need to make your point. Review your blogs by asking:

1. • Does the blog have a single focus?
   • Is it well written and easy to read?
   • Are there obvious takeaway points?
   • Does the article include links to blogs on your site about related topics?
   • Can you back up and link to reputable sources for any factual information or quotes you’ve used in the blog?
   • Is the content helpful?
   • Does the article go into sufficient detail?
   • Is the article easy to skim read?
   • Do the headings and subheadings make clear what the article is about?
   • Are the images relevant to the content?

High-quality content will please more than just Google

Ensuring that your website boasts only high-quality content isn’t just a move that will put you in Google’s good graces and grow your website’s overall Quality Score. Your potential and existing customers will also thank you, and you should see an improvement in your conversion rates and sales.

As we’ve discussed, people want to spend time on websites that provide a good experience. They want to feel that if you give away this much value for free, they will get so much more by hiring your services or buying your products. They want to know that you are an expert in your field and that they won’t regret choosing your business over your competitions. Therefore, creating unforgettable content will go a long way to increasing your brand visibility and influence, and providing that all-important reassurance that yours is a safe pair of hands.

Helpful Resources

You may find the following articles and resources helpful when it comes to increasing your website’s quality score:

1. • Google’s guide to creating valuable content
   • The key points from Google’s leaked ‘Quality Rater Guidelines’
   • Yoast’s ultimate guide to canonical URLs
   • Siteliner
   • Yoast’s SEO plugin
   • How to correctly delete pages from your website
   • 301 redirects
   • How to do a content audit guaranteed to boost your SEO

Were you aware of Google’s quality score and that this affects rankings for ALL your pages? What kind of content have you been experimenting with and what has reaped the most results for you? I’d love to know – please leave a comment below.

I hope you’ve found this article helpful.

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