On August 11th, 2017 long time SEO guru Rand Fishkin published an article on the Moz.com blog titled “Google (Almost Certainly) Has an Organic Quality Score (Or Something a Lot Like It) that SEOs Need to Optimize For – Whiteboard Friday.”
In the post, Mr. Fishkin theorizes that Google gives a quality score to organic webpages similar to the score given within a Google Adwords campaign.
And this makes sense to me (and a bunch of other SEO types) as there are many indicators of this behavior in the SERP’s.
As another piece of evidence for this puzzle I would like to submit is Google’s own “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines” in which webpages are hand-graded by people and not machines. What do they do with this information other than wrap it into their algorithm for ranking webpages? In the most recent 160-page document (see link below) Google goes into great detail about which factors make up low, medium and high-quality webpages.
Whether or not Google has an official organic quality score program or not is a moot point (as oppose to cows that have a moo point or nagging spouses that need a mute point). The Google algo behaves as if it does have this feature.
According to Mr. Fishkin in this same article, there are three actions that SEO’s can take regardless of whether this program is official or a very good theory which include:
- add more high-performing pages
- improve the quality of existing pages
- remove low-performing pages
That said, get to work. 🙂
References
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
https://moz.com/blog/organic-quality-score
