What you Need to Know About Google’s Quality Update

Long Island web design company, Logic Web Media explains google’s quality update and how it affects your search rankings.

After the clear unleash of google’s mobile-friendly update named Mobilegeddon, many we’re surprised by yet another update only weeks later. Google’s quality update unleashed on May 19th, causing many search engine optimization followers to be startled. In the world of search, this update was dubbed Phantom 2, because it was the 2nd nameless update to be released in two years. At first glance many search marketers were suspicious their rankings dropped because of the mobile-friendly update. However, it was easy to prove this assumption wrong because many of the sites affected were clearly mobile responsive.

What is the Quality Update?

In broader terms the update means sites which carry higher quality will display higher up on SERP’s. Updates from google are always happening, “Our general goal is to make sure that the quality of the search results are really as high as possible,” said John Muelleer, a Webmaster Trends Analyst. It was confirmed during a google+ hangout the update was a normal algorithm update focusing on the quality of your data throughout your entire website. This means websites are being penalized as a whole rather than just specific pages. If your domain has to many spammy pages it will harshly affect the entire site instead of specific pages which has happened in the past. Many how-to sites noticed large declines in their sites overall traffic. Although not all of the pages within the site were lacking quality, the new update affects domains as a whole.
 

How Does Google Measure Quality?

• Unique Content
• Content to Pages Ratio
• Click Through Rates
• User Experience
• Link Relevancy
• Mobile Responsive
• Ad. Relevancy
• Keywords
• Page Architecture

 
It all starts with creating valuable content. Content is the gateway to engaging users and possibly getting them to link to, or share your site. Having quality content will keep visitors on your site, which in turn lowers bounce rates and increases your sites stickiness (anything on a website that keeps your visitor on the page longer) of your site. Accurate content will allow google to properly match your webpages to the correct search results. For more strategies on getting better results in google check out our 10 quick tips to enhance SEO post.
 

SEO Practices that Negatively Affect a Pages Quality

• Scraped content: This means taking content from other sites and publishing it as your own, also known as plagiarism.
• Incorrect redirect links: Linking is meant to enhance the users experience, incorrect redirects negatively affect your link strategy.
• Only using rich snippets when applicable: Rich snippets are a great way to provide extra information under search results. Google only allows them to be used for events, products, recipes and reviews.
• Building pages that have no original content or thin content.