Does Quora pay Google to rank?

How does a paywalled site like Quora rank for all imaginable queries?

How much do they pay Google to rank?

If any small site did this they'd be penalized to oblivion.

This is obvious pay to rank.

Good question, I've wondered the same but came to no conclusive result.

At first, I thought it was to do with the insane growth, and content being uploaded daily on the site as well as its funding to grow the site which made Google think of the site as high quality but because of the paywall, it makes no sense to have them rank high due to limitation for the average user.

bartosimpsonio said:

How does a paywalled site like Quora rank for all imaginable queries?

How much do they pay Google to rank?

If any small site did this they'd be penalized to oblivion.

This is obvious pay to rank.

Click to expand...

I think quora isn't a paywall site after all they don't charge you money to read the content...

And by the way am not sure it's against Google search console to have users register before being to access the entire site content.

Why they rank so high? isn't that very obvious to you?


Quora is a very active site with new content in the form of answers every single day or even hours.... The best part is that a good percentage of these answers are valid information that can be really trusted, Google can't resist that honestly unless they want to lose out in some way.

What do you mean by paywall? Quora in the very few time i have used it has no paywall, I dont even need to register to read the answers.

Anyway the answer is simple, it is a very high ranking site, its in the top 100 of Alexa rankings, and they have very high amounts of content that is updated pretty much every minute. It isnt too hard to see why it always ranks high on Google. I doubt they pay for the rank but I suppose nothing is impossible.

I highly doubt so. Last time I took a serious look at SEO it was not considered out of the ordinary to have a very high authority message board/forum ranking above low authority websites, even those more precisely calibrated in keywords for that particular niche.
Even if a website that is somewhat informative, and has good metrics to go along with content, ranks above sites like Quora or Reddit (2 top contenders for any keyword without good competition), the visitors retain longer on those message boards naturally and often win over dedicated websites through visitor attrition at first.

The website recovers after a couple of months if quality content and some backlinking is invested into it.
Google basically 'waits' to see if it's any better than just a broad-spectrum forum. Not literally of course, but the current way algorithms work basically leaves such an impression.This also goes for wikihow/wikipedia and such sites.

As for quora being paywalled, I don't completely agree with that. I never ever turn off my AdBlock, let alone register for something, and Quora had me registering the 2nd time I visited it. It's was just so good back then and I couldn't resist.
I'd imagine an overwhelming majority of people register for Quora on their early visits. Considering it's going down in quality the trend may change, but something else will just replace Quora, and it may be Reddit, for example.

Its just about authority. Websites like Quora, Wikipedia etc. will never ever face any penalty.

Then there is one more thing to consider: Most of the CEO's, which are in Silicon Valley (and probably successful), actually know each other. I don't think they would fuck each other up.

Sara-Chan said:

What do you mean by paywall? Quora in the very few time i have used it has no paywall, I dont even need to register to read the answers.

Anyway the answer is simple, it is a very high ranking site, its in the top 100 of Alexa rankings, and they have very high amounts of content that is updated pretty much every minute. It isnt too hard to see why it always ranks high on Google. I doubt they pay for the rank but I suppose nothing is impossible.

Click to expand...

didn't you observed that quora asks you for registration if you're new user, unless, content doesn't get showed up

nakamura said:

Its just about authority. Websites like Quora, Wikipedia etc. will never ever face any penalty.

Then there is one more thing to consider: Most of the CEO's, which are in Silicon Valley (and probably successful), actually know each other. I don't think they would fuck each other up.

Click to expand...

This cannot be the reason why Quora ranks so well.

Rahuldev09 said:

didn't you observed that quora asks you for registration if you're new user, unless, content doesn't get showed up

Click to expand...

Not for me but it may be because I Have ublock on. I also havent used quora more than a few times. Its possible that it might work like most forums where the Googlebot can crawl the site without registering, but other users cannot read without registration.

krishnaverma said:

This cannot be the reason why Quora ranks so well.

Click to expand...

Here is the reason: 25 million backlinks, 66,7 million organic keywords (increasing daily) all the content is made by user.
Everyone in here would rank so well, if we would add unique handwritten thousands of different articles to our websites and target 10k keywords every single day.

No they do not. They have got so big users base that they do not have to pay to google or to anyone. But Google and quora both need each other.

I do remember hearing about a big PUA forum who had to remove their "sign up to read the forum" banner that users were greeted with when clicking on an indexed forum link on Google.

Wasn't sure if it was to do with Google or not though but Google favored them less afterwards on the SERPS.

HenryObi said:

I think quora isn't a paywall site after all they don't charge you money to read the content...

Click to expand...

LOLWUT?

Sara-Chan said:

What do you mean by paywall? Quora in the very few time i have used it has no paywall, I dont even need to register to read the answers.

Anyway the answer is simple, it is a very high ranking site, its in the top 100 of Alexa rankings, and they have very high amounts of content that is updated pretty much every minute. It isnt too hard to see why it always ranks high on Google. I doubt they pay for the rank but I suppose nothing is impossible.

Click to expand...

First of all yes they are behind a paywall.

Secondly that's circular logic, they have high traffic because Google ranks them high. You don't rank high in G because you got alexa rank. Geezus.

nakamura said:

Its just about authority. Websites like Quora, Wikipedia etc. will never ever face any penalty.

Then there is one more thing to consider: Most of the CEO's, which are in Silicon Valley (and probably successful), actually know each other. I don't think they would fuck each other up.

Click to expand...

I think you're on the right track here. That's what this is about. It's politics and money.

Google rankings for big sites are manual.

krishnaverma said:

This cannot be the reason why Quora ranks so well.

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Not at all. There's more to it.

ALSO PINTEREST. 100% spam, images are never on the page they show and it's paywalled.

These big sites have some arrangement with G.

Sara-Chan said:

Not for me but it may be because I Have ublock on. I also havent used quora more than a few times. Its possible that it might work like most forums where the Googlebot can crawl the site without registering, but other users cannot read without registration.

Click to expand...

Yeah but that's cloaking and if you do it you get nuked off serps. Showing googlebot one thing and users another yields penalties for little guys. Why not for major spammers like quora?

nakamura said:

Here is the reason: 25 million backlinks, 66,7 million organic keywords (increasing daily) all the content is made by user.
Everyone in here would rank so well, if we would add unique handwritten thousands of different articles to our websites and target 10k keywords every single day.

Click to expand...

Sounds like content farming to me? Google penalizes ezinearticles and so many other sites, why not penalize these select few like quora, pinterest and others who massively generate bad content daily?

They just allow Google bot user agent or Google bot IP address to read /index full content. And it's not cloaking if they follow Google guide :

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywalled-content

This schema only needed by googlebot so we as visitor maybe never saw this schema.

For anyone who wants to do this just make sure that the content for Google bot with this schema and for registered member without this schema is the same content to avoid penalty/manual review.

I'm more surprised they have not been blocked by their email provider considering how they spam people once they have signed up. Even after you unsubscribe you many times continue receive their spam. The whole website is like a large Nigerian scam.

bartosimpsonio said:

LOLWUT?



First of all yes they are behind a paywall.

Secondly that's circular logic, they have high traffic because Google ranks them high. You don't rank high in G because you got alexa rank. Geezus.



I think you're on the right track here. That's what this is about. It's politics and money.

Google rankings for big sites are manual.



Not at all. There's more to it.

ALSO PINTEREST. 100% spam, images are never on the page they show and it's paywalled.

These big sites have some arrangement with G.



Yeah but that's cloaking and if you do it you get nuked off serps. Showing googlebot one thing and users another yields penalties for little guys. Why not for major spammers like quora?



Sounds like content farming to me? Google penalizes ezinearticles and so many other sites, why not penalize these select few like quora, pinterest and others who massively generate bad content daily?

Click to expand...

They are "white-listed" per se. They will never face any penalties because they are established sites that provide 'help' to the public and that's what google is all about.
The real question is if the google knowledge panel that often shows up in the serps, yeah that one, does it scrape answers from quora?

mhtro said:

They are "white-listed" per se. They will never face any penalties because they are established sites that provide 'help' to the public and that's what google is all about.
The real question is if the google knowledge panel that often shows up in the serps, yeah that one, does it scrape answers from quora?

Click to expand...

What you call "established" and so on is exactly what I'm talking about here.

If you pay up you get "established"?

The point is: it's not about content yadda yadda, it's about paying to rank.

Google scraping: it's getting really absurd. I see sites who spend millions of U$ in content getting their content shown straight in the SERPs....heck, even in the search box it's showing hints now! Google is keeping the traffic to themselves. It's absurd really.

Quora does not have a paywall, if it did you would actually have to pay to view the content. If anything, it is more of an example of a content locker.

it the authorities of the website .

google needs quora and quora needs google the same with any other authorities website .