This is what SEO talk sounds like when 5 experts meet


Yesterday I had a look at this recorded hangout on air embedded below of “How Does Google Determine Content Quality? How Would You?” whicht hosted the following five speakers:
+Eric Enge, +Bill Slawski, +Ammon Johns, +David Harry, +Mark Traphagen

I have seen those guys speak in various other recorded HoAs and their discussions always deliver a series of goodies and take aways (in the sense of their conclusions and research work around SEO) for the ones interested about SEO and the arts of online marketing.

While for many; SEO is believed to be just link building, getting the content and titles of their pages right. Have a look at this discussion and discover the depths of SEO and its technical aspect. The panda update was mentioned several times. It’s been since a long time that I don’t follow up on Google updates any more, once upon a time when there were still those Google dances… Following these guys gets you quickly back on track.

My first expectation of their discussion; was it going to be the revelation how you create a high quality page? It turned out more to be what are the different aspects Google looks at to determine quality and how search results differ depending to various criteria such as the intent of the search, the time it was done. Some great examples where also mentioned such as sport games – how these results differ depending at what time you are doing your search.

These are my notes of their discussion round:
High quality site algorithm
Patterns (Points attribution or content quality scores. User behaviour being observed by quality raters to notice some patterns.)
Signals of low quality
Quality raters
Identifying domain place holder pages, content farms, link pages

Main content and secondary content.
Main navigation and secondary navigation.

Serving the user intent.
Utility and site scores.
Query dependant.

Query targeting instead of just focusing on keywords.
What is the intent and how is Google going to understand that content.

Pizza example mentioned by Bill Slawski.
To inform, interact and not necessarily spectacular content. Semantics. User query intent.

Knowledge graph. Google grabs answers and presents it in those boxes.
Temporal and freshness. (Relevants can be temporal)
User behaviour. Lots of recurring querios at a specific period in time, such as during the game of red sox vs. another team – while they are playing, before and after.

How do people respond to certain results? Spreading out the feelers and counting the click troughs.

Quality content score.

Be proactive!


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