Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)

One often hears the phrase “quality over quantity”. It’s as pervasive as watching TV or perhaps taking a bath. When it comes to the world of SEO, experts conclude that the quality of the document content (as measured algorithmically) is highly important. However, as it is also highly disputed, it has become one of the most controversial aspects.

Everybody in the World Wide Web knows how highly significant quality content is. Excellent content with proper promotion rakes in high traffic. And high traffic means a good chance of hoarding inbound links. Of course not all inbound links are helpful – links from spammy sites affects one’s Google’s trust score. However, one can hope that the ratio of links from trusted sites is higher than that of spammy ones.

So, the higher the number of inbound links from trusted sites, the higher the search engine ranking. Point made. But that’s not what this is about. This is about quality of the document content as measured algorithmically.

So what is an algorithm? An algorithm is a finite number of steps or instructions for solving a specific problem or accomplishing a task. It is used in computing, mathematics, linguistics and other similar disciplines. The Google algorithm is composed of two things; the text matching system used to find pages during keyword searches and their patented PageRank system.

Quality is a widely subjective term. There is no universal rule as to how it should be measured. Which brings us to the question, how does the Google algorithm measure the document content based on quality?

Google does not determine universal quality. They do not try to assert authority on what “quality” is. Google measures quality based on the relevancy of the document content to the search query. If this is true, then a webpage doesn’t need to have content written by the likes of a neurosurgeon. What’s important is to produce keyword rich content for the people to find a webpage. After all, you can’t expect academic quality documents in fan sites, for example.

Even so, there are some SEO experts who believe that Google does manual boosting of rankings. It has been conjectured that the manual boost is given to websites with high trust rankings. A site which follows all of Google’s guidelines and receives a trust score of 100%, might just find itself provided with a bit of help from the search engine. It’s most probably at this kind of situation that quality content matters the most.