High Quality is Not Good Enough!

byDianeScorpio

18.1K followers

Updated 5 years ago

So, today we are going to discuss what determines a high quality page, as described in Google's manual for its evaluators. You may recall that I mentioned the sliding scale in a previous post, whereby pages are ranked from lowest to highest.

A high quality page is not the top of the scale, it is second. From that, we can infer, that even if you meet all the characteristics of high quality, you may not be on page 1. That glorious position would be reserved for the highest quality, a subject I will be discussing tomorrow.

Now, lets take a look at the manual, pages 19 and 20.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

To sumarise, a high quality page should have a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well. Plus, a high level of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. A satisfying amount of high quality content. (Note, that they don't specify how many words equals "a satisfying amount").

So, now we know what they are looking for, lets examine the definition of high quality main content. This isn't very in-depth and says it must have taken "time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill".

And here are the methods they employ:

"For each page you evaluate, spend a few minutes examining the main content (MC) before drawing a conclusion about it. Read the article, watch the video, examine the pictures, use the calculator, play the online game, etc. Remember that MC also includes page features and functionality, so test the page out. For example, if the page is a product page on a store website, put at least one product in the cart to make sure the shopping cart is functioning. If the page is an online game,spend a few minutes playing it.

The purpose of the page will help you determine what high quality content means for that page. For example, High quality information pages should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive. High quality shopping content should allow users to find the products they want and to purchase the products easily. High quality humor or satire should be entertaining, while factual accuracy is not a requirement as long as the page would be understood as satire by users.

The amount of content necessary for the page to be satisfying depends on the topic and purpose of the page. A High quality page on a broad topic with a lot of available information will have more content than a High quality page on a narrower topic."

From this, we can see that they don't just skim the article - they read it, test it, look at the images, watch the videos etc. The take away from this, is that every aspect of your posts need to meet the high quality standards. And bear in mind, this is not the highest, that is a whole new level, and as I said earlier, I will discuss that tomorrow. I do hope you can contain your excitement until then!