In a tacit admission that Web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages, Google has revised its methods to improve the usefulness of its results.
It's a method intended to block the low-quality pages that pollute the results of more established competitors, says Rich Skrenta, a cofounder of the company, which has raised $24 million in funding since 2007.
Having a lot of low-quality pages hanging off your site will also drag down your overall ranking even for pages that feature the kind of content Google wants to promote.
Without those standards, we end up with too many low-quality pages that our volunteer community has a hard time maintaining.
We asked Facebook to respond to Derek Muller's video and explain what appeared to be fake likes for his Virtual Cat. The company said he had created a low quality page and had not proved that the likers were fake: "They may also like a lot of other pages, which does not mean that they are not real people - lots of real people like lots of things".
Google knows enough to associate poor grammar and spelling with low quality pages.
Google's recent "Panda" update intentionally upends this ecosystem; it doesn't just lower the rankings of individual pages that the algorithm deems "low quality" (however that may be defined by Google) but, as Google has said publicly, "low-quality [page] content [on the domain] can impact an entire domain".
Furthermore, as Google© (www.google.com) is the most frequently used search engine worldwide, a valuable opportunity for screening low-quality web pages is provided by freely downloadable Google Toolbars's PageRank© (www.toolbar.google.com).com
Creating low-quality, low-cost information pages has become such big business that the leading content farm, Demand Media, just went public and is valued at $1.9 billion.
Today it exclusively told TechCrunch that it will show links less prominently in the News Feed if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait headlines or landing pages overflowing with low-quality ads.
In other words, even if one of your pages experiences a high volume of low-quality links, your rankings will be lower only for that page.
