What Does "Quality Content" Mean?

Last Update: March 08, 2011

 As a reader who checks out Google for information, I would consider an article to have quality if it gives me the information that I am seeking in a credible manner, so that I can trust it is honest and based on some knowledge of the topic. The author's "subjective" opinion is welcomed. I'm always interested in educated opinions, especially if they differ from mine. I'm always interested in seeing things from another vantage point too. If the author wants to tell a story to illustrate his/her point, that's great. Makes the read much more interesting. And humor seals the deal.

Now, that's the way this human looks at it. But what about Google? How is Google going to determine if an article is worthy, using all their spider thingamajigs and new tech?  I've always resented being measured by any machine. I don't like judgement at all, even by humans. I have no choice but to concede in some instances, since evaluation is sometimes necessary. Here are examples: a contest like American Idol, or getting into college, or determining if someone is guilty of a crime, or to determine if an article is just taking up space on the Internet. Humans should evaluate humans, at least in the last analysis. So, what do you think Google is doing? Using artificial intelligence, of course.

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled that Google is after quality content. And it's not because I fancy myself Ernest Hemingway either. I'm just too simple minded to think up all those clever ways of tricking Google and getting links and ranking that way. Too much work. Find it much easier to just play it straight. It has not been thrilling for me to re-learn how to write to make keyword density feel natural. I've learned to do it with a degree of skill, but it still doesn't read as well as an article just simply written. 

In my quest to find out how Google is going to determine if an article passes muster or not, I discovered LSI Latent Semantic Indexing. I know many of you already know what that is. For those who don't, it is software that tries to understand the relationship between words in a paragraph, and relationship to other paragraphs in the entire document, then relationship between pages in your website, and relationship to the theme/s of your site.  It's all about relevance. The LSI algorithm just sees patterns and word usage to show word relationships in the all over theme. Doesn't have to be the same theme on each page, but it should show relevance. It's a more sophisticated way  to analyze a site than just looking at keywords. Not as smart as we humans are, but heck, how many people does Google need to employ for this purpose?

When you think about it, this will supply better search results. Also LSI can filter out unwanted information. 

Go into ThemeZoom to learn more about LSI. There are tutorials on the site. This strategy, used with keyword research, can be very beneficial for long term rewards.

Share your thoughts.

Join the Discussion
Write something…
Recent messages
jatdebeaune Premium
Hahaha, Bob, I'm already unbalanced. Google is going to make me crazy like Charlie Sheen. Only kidding. Can you believe that guy was being paid $2million an episode and he blew it? I still think it's important to optimize with keywords, but I'm going to try being more relaxed with it, just let it flow and see what happens.
klrrider Premium
I really think all this "provide better content" that Google is squawking about is just them dragging the red hearing across the trail to cover their tracks. A way to keep us unbalanced and trying harder. Although content counts they can only go so far in judging it mechanically... but they can see how many visitors you are getting and rank you accordingly. The more visitors the better they rank you. If you write good material and get a lot of traffic because of it the spiders will figure out what your content is about even if it isn't optimized to the max. Favor your readers especially if you have the skills (like you) for the rest of us... well we better optimize! lol
Top