MayDay - What Are the Quality Signals?

darkface said:

@Gemini: Can you show a similar site that to the ones you are building? I just can't see the set up in my head somehow. Cheers

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I can't I'm afraid. Not because I don't want to, but because I don't know of any out there that are comparable to what I have in mind.

Right guys i might be wrong but what i've notice is that the factors that matter in regards to ranking a site is all about the way a site works eg: things that are important, price being shown words and information such as product description, product features product details, are all words that should be used on our site, just like the way amazon displays stuff, heres a screen shot of a web page and where i think the important factors are.



Now guys i now this screen shots a bit shit but its the best can can do for now, top markings are the categories, other factors are brand, price, buy button. feedback please

I took a look at that example.

What I find being consistent are how the sections they have always show brand as the identifier of the product. I think Google is getting better at recognizing brand names out there. I remember this discussion about that going on a few years back with Aaaron Wall about this brand recognition thing with google. With this shift, they likely are using brand as part of the identification of quality signals as a product based page/site.

I think it's best to display products by primary category, and then have your first page all by brands, and similar to what these guys have done, of course have the options for price and product attribute search. How can we do this? I think tags are the way to go

You're right. Right now a search for shopping keyword will reveal some popular brands above the search result.

It's interesting to see how to actually use these changes and apply them to new or existing web sites.

I decided to see if I could find any information more out there about the recent update. Perhaps the best page I found was here:

http://www.irbtrax.com/Google-Caffeine-Updates.php

I basically confirmed a lot of what we already discovered on our own. I also found this snippet:

- Review the H1 or Header tag. The Header tag is important for accurate indexing and search relevancy. Avoid using a Header tag that duplicates word for word what?s contained in the Title Tag.

- Review the Meta Title and Description Tags (MTDT)- The MTDT are very important due to search relevancy and accuracy of site indexing. The Title Tag should contain a businesses most important keywords. Clear, concise, and informative Meta Tags have shown to help improve page ranking and produce better SERP's.

- Review and apply the above methods to the sub MTDT. Accurate and relevant sub MTDT can often achieve a higher page rank than a company?s primary MTDT due to the ability to achieve a much narrower search phrase focus.

- Analyze and review the most important text on the Home page. Website content must be consistent with your MTDT and relevant to a site's theme, products or services in order to be accurately indexed. Keep in mind that key text imbedded in images cannot be crawled. This information would be best used for the H1 or Header Tag.

- Update website content as often as possible. Updated content reflects a site that's not stagnant. A site's visitors and the Search Engines take notice of this activity. Lastly, target audience search trends change so it's important to monitor them and enhance content to reflect these situations. Failure to do so will leave the door open for the competition to capitalize on these important opportunities.
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The bit about h1 and titles I thought otherwise. I always took them to being an exact match.

Hope some of this info helps you guys out in catching those quality signals.

You can never go wrong with good content. That is all well and good but googlebot is a machine. It can't process the content in the same way as the user. It can't determine the quality of the content unless it can process natural language, which if it did would make search results a lot better. So they must be looking for some signals. In order to trick google we need to use these to our advantage.

MisterGemini said:

I took a look at that example.

What I find being consistent are how the sections they have always show brand as the identifier of the product. I think Google is getting better at recognizing brand names out there. I remember this discussion about that going on a few years back with Aaaron Wall about this brand recognition thing with google. With this shift, they likely are using brand as part of the identification of quality signals as a product based page/site.

I think it's best to display products by primary category, and then have your first page all by brands, and similar to what these guys have done, of course have the options for price and product attribute search. How can we do this? I think tags are the way to go

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Tags are the way to go because the gbot will pick up on the words on the page which wont make your site look a total mess, price added? the only thing you can do is add buy buttons and put your link inside the jpeg which makes it easy for the user to buy the product from that page. content may still matter but not as much as before, user experience is the key and because of this its best to keep your pages as basic as possible.

Another thing guy with all have to stop listening to the monkey matt cutts and really want to hear from the organ grinder, the guys head of spam and only passes on messages that he's been told to do.

thestig said:

Tags are the way to go because the gbot will pick up on the words on the page which wont make your site look a total mess, price added? the only thing you can do is add buy buttons and put your link inside the jpeg which makes it easy for the user to buy the product from that page. content may still matter but not as much as before, user experience is the key and because of this its best to keep your pages as basic as possible.

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Yeah, I am seeing at least in the minimum, brand, price, and 'more info' links for each items and/or price being listed.

Ever noticed how google always indexes tag search terms? Half the time I look at a site, the very first pages on site: coming up are tag= pages. I am wondering if it might be because these tag search pages to google are offering more/better information than the original page/categories prepped by the site owner. That would make sense because the tag search then takes all related tags into a condensed single page/category of it's own.

Cyno403 said:

Yes obviously there's the signals google will look out for but as long I can get my coders and content writers to understand good coding and good content, is to the benefit of the site, those tricks we use with google (funny enough I finished a lesson with the content writers about some tricks urm anyway) will really work...

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What exactly did you teach them if I may ask? Would be interesting to know what kind of tricks you teach to your writers

darkface said:

What exactly did you teach them if I may ask? Would be interesting to know what kind of tricks you teach to your writers

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Guys forget about good content, this is one of the factors that i beleave holds no real weight anymore, of course your need product descriptions, but writing a long arse 500 word article thats going to cost you time and money? save them for the article sites for backlinks, i would love to hear how people like brian johnson and john xfactor aregetting on, it all seems quite at the moment, and one thing i have learned with this google update is to keep your knowledge of how you making money to yourself, i look at the number i views in this theard and the one person who is trying to work it out is mr friend Mr G, dude i hope it works for you but i just hate to see all the page views and no real input, the reason the game changed is because people like xfactor told the world about his method and everyone under the sun started to build mfa sites, adsense is now dead for the little man, just for the moment anyway.

People may say that i'm out of order for my outburst but if you just hear to suck info from the real guys putting in the imput then you can just go and suck on an egg, well i'm out of here to build and rebuild my site laters...

thestig said:

Guys forget about good content, this is one of the factors that i beleave holds no real weight anymore, of course your need product descriptions, but writing a long arse 500 word article thats going to cost you time and money? save them for the article sites for backlinks, i would love to hear how people like brian johnson and john xfactor aregetting on, it all seems quite at the moment, and one thing i have learned with this google update is to keep your knowledge of how you making money to yourself, i look at the number i views in this theard and the one person who is trying to work it out is mr friend Mr G, dude i hope it works for you but i just hate to see all the page views and no real input, the reason the game changed is because people like xfactor told the world about his method and everyone under the sun started to build mfa sites, adsense is now dead for the little man, just for the moment anyway.

People may say that i'm out of order for my outburst but if you just hear to suck info from the real guys putting in the imput then you can just go and suck on an egg, well i'm out of here to build and rebuild my site laters...

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I think the idea of good content is something that has just shifted with all this. Good content is now relevant to the category you serve.

Most of your queries have been about product data, so obviously you are interested in that. In which case, good content is all about brand, product image, price, product attributes. It is NOT a 500 word article, or an image gallery, or a video, or anything lengthy. Good content in that case is an abundant source of the data I mentioned within a given page/category.

For many other things however, like the 'how to' queries, it is definitely the 500 word article including some form of unordered list in it, or a Step by Step list. Or video content.

For the 'how to make' queries, it is definitely a well written article detailing.

For the health queries, still written content.

For any geo-targeted term, you will get trumped by a google map in #1 now if there is any local business match for it.

List goes on, and it really depends on each persons own niche to determine whats going on.

I do think the MFA sites are suffering if they were based on product. If however they were based on other factors they might be doing ok. Everyone knows all the traffic is in the Top 5.. after that, you are getting scraps. No where near the projected search volumes reported in tools. Thus poor results.

This whole change definitely impacted my new projects. It got me thinking one step ahead to Web 3.0 even, and I am building accordingly.

Exactly, you can still make money with the how to articles and target that range of google categorization. Most of the tell signs we're picking up are coming primarily from the ecommerce sites because many of them get affected, and to those that do global enterprise seo have definitely felt the pain.

But that being said, mna/mfa sites will still exist but now they'll evolve. Once we're able to key in on those factors that enable us to game the algo, we'll be one step ahead. What i'd like to test next is how does the performance of a non-ecommerce site that isn't updated at all (brand new site) fare against a non-ecommerce site that is set up to be updated daily.

I guess thequestion really is how much of a weighted factor does freshness add to this new aglo

cody41 said:

Exactly, you can still make money with the how to articles and target that range of google categorization. Most of the tell signs we're picking up are coming primarily from the ecommerce sites because many of them get affected, and to those that do global enterprise seo have definitely felt the pain.

But that being said, mna/mfa sites will still exist but now they'll evolve. Once we're able to key in on those factors that enable us to game the algo, we'll be one step ahead. What i'd like to test next is how does the performance of a non-ecommerce site that isn't updated at all (brand new site) fare against a non-ecommerce site that is set up to be updated daily.

I guess thequestion really is how much of a weighted factor does freshness add to this new aglo

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I am sure it is given a fair amount of weight, though some of the results turning up now are oddly showing some older stuff now at the top. I think fresher pages need to be combined with more established sites with some link authority. In other words, if your entire site is new, your freshness means nada. If your site is established (meaning has maybe has links coming to it constantly for over 2 weeks) then your fresh stuff will start appearing as a trustworthy source. I could be off on the 2 week thing btw.. seems for some, depending on the competition, it takes 1-2 months, or maybe even longer.

I've got some sites that are sitting stagnant since they were built 3 or 4 years ago and they're still ranked as a top 5 site in google's serps. I built the hell out of them, even though they're 20-25 pages each, but i think they were given an overall Quality Average Score by google as somewhat trustworthy at the time which means that they're beating out newer pages by a bunch. I think there's something to be said about being grandfathered at the time your QAS was assigned to the site awhile ago independent of what's going on now with mayday being rolled out...

MisterGemini said:

I think the idea of good content is something that has just shifted with all this. Good content is now relevant to the category you serve.

Most of your queries have been about product data, so obviously you are interested in that. In which case, good content is all about brand, product image, price, product attributes. It is NOT a 500 word article, or an image gallery, or a video, or anything lengthy. Good content in that case is an abundant source of the data I mentioned within a given page/category.

For many other things however, like the 'how to' queries, it is definitely the 500 word article including some form of unordered list in it, or a Step by Step list. Or video content.

For the 'how to make' queries, it is definitely a well written article detailing.

For the health queries, still written content.

For any geo-targeted term, you will get trumped by a google map in #1 now if there is any local business match for it.

List goes on, and it really depends on each persons own niche to determine whats going on.

I do think the MFA sites are suffering if they were based on product. If however they were based on other factors they might be doing ok. Everyone knows all the traffic is in the Top 5.. after that, you are getting scraps. No where near the projected search volumes reported in tools. Thus poor results.

This whole change definitely impacted my new projects. It got me thinking one step ahead to Web 3.0 even, and I am building accordingly.

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your right on the money my old friend, 500 articles will still have their place for niche in regards to health etc, about products i've noticed the important factors that seem to matter and am now in the race to build back up some sites that i had atken offline, keyword domain, not sure just have to wait and see as i'm testing these factors as well. i want to test video as a marketing tool also, anyone had an experience using this method with success please drop in a comment just to say if it did work.

MisterGemini said:

My aversion to the dashed domain was based on tests done a few years ago. Since then I have just had an aversion for domains-like-this-one.com. Maybe the age/linking history of the existing one is the case as you say.

As for the sloppy joe, I think that's a good example. However, I'm getting the impression now that this is more about page quality and less about domain authority. If the cooking site has a totally kickass sloppy joe page, it could beat the hamburger site that didn't do as good a job with it.

Are we getting anywhere here?

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My domain has two dashes ???-????-???.com and disappeared from the #4 position for a week. But its back in the #2 position as of today, in AU, UK, USA searches. -'s are not a factor, in fact its been reported that dashes in a domain name make more sense because google doesnt have to pick though the letters to understand what they mean.

pucky said:

My domain has two dashes ???-????-???.com and disappeared from the #4 position for a week. But its back in the #2 position as of today, in AU, UK, USA searches. -'s are not a factor, in fact its been reported that dashes in a domain name make more sense because google doesnt have to pick though the letters to understand what they mean.

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Having dashes is not really a good idea but it seems to work for you, best advice is to try and keep away from the dashes and if you have a domain name you want but cant get it because its take then add words such as sale, buy, shopping , buydogfood.co.uk or dogfoodsale.co.uk

pucky said:

My domain has two dashes ???-????-???.com and disappeared from the #4 position for a week. But its back in the #2 position as of today, in AU, UK, USA searches. -'s are not a factor, in fact its been reported that dashes in a domain name make more sense because google doesnt have to pick though the letters to understand what they mean.

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Since you are ranking in the UK I've got a question for you. Is your domain a .com or a .co.uk? Is it hosted on a UK or US server? What percentage of backlinks is in fact of .co.uk domains and what percentage is of .com domains?

Cheers

Cyno403 said:

google is going crazy again with my site...

pages crawled per day just beat May's record by 15%
Kilobytes downloaded per day, is matching May's trends, but is on a massive spike
yet time spent on pages is at a new low

also, my queries hasn't updated for 2 days

anyone else seeing this?

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I have seen generally a lot more spidering activity too. I am hearing from a lot of people it is much easier to get indexed now, though they are still not ranking on anythnig. They are getting at the MOST into #5 spots. Rest are in nowhereville.