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February 2, 2007

25 Signals of Poor Quality Sites

Typically, you have threads about, how do I make my site better or what do I need to do to rank higher. Then people may discuss topics such as unique content, link building, etc. There is a thread at WebmasterWorld that takes the reverse approach. They discuss 25 things that may make a site appear to have poor signals of quality in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Here are the top 10 from the list:

  1. Reciprocal link request pages.
  2. No Privacy policy.
  3. Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages.
  4. Error pages that don't send 404 headers or send content regardless of the page requested/querystring entered.
  5. Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
  6. Dead/404ing links.
  7. High link churn.
  8. No published contact address, email address or phone number.
  9. A high bounce rate (surfers clicking back on their browser and selecting another search result).
  10. Too much duplicate content.

For the remaining 15, check out the thread.

This is one of those fun threads, I personally do not necessarily agree with everything in the thread, but I found it unique.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at February 2, 2007 8:04 AM Comments (7)

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Comments

Not sure why this are signs of poor quality.

- No Privacy policy. => Can't find this on many, including this site.

- No published contact address, email address or phone number => For stores its weird, for content sites it's more a matter of privacy.

- Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages. => Digg's copyright message is still 2006

- Dead/404ing links => Every site has this. Unless your site is like only 5-pages long. I bet a site like Slashdot has a huge amount of dead links.

 

Posted by Thomas at February 2, 2007 10:56

Actually, copyright date is the year your site was first published. A site should have FIRST YEAR - CURRENT YEAR so handle both establishing when it was launched and establishing that it's been updated.

 

Posted by Jordan Kasteler at February 3, 2007 14:52

It is all true, because I have site which from top go to 2-7 page in google ( it have 3 from factors)!

 

Posted by Solomon at February 4, 2007 15:14

14) Hmmm. If I have a site whose contents need no updating, then what shall I do?

17) Really? While citation to external sites are definitely helpful, they may not be always necessary for certain pages.

One thing missing from the list is the overwhelming presence of Adsense ads that almost always mix with content.

 

Posted by Elmer W. Cagape at February 5, 2007 04:25

So, what does a perfect site look like?

 

Posted by Furd Terguson at February 5, 2007 08:25

Quality of the copy. Writing style and writing technique are analyzed and scored. If you are trying to sell corporate items and your writing style is at the 5th grade level it will be less likely your site will rank well for corporate keywords.

MS Word has had the capability of analyzing writing style for years, imagine how well a team of PhD Engineers at Google have refined this process.

 

Posted by CVOS at February 5, 2007 16:56

I have the perfect site if you wish to see what a perfect site looks like. But these are all great indicators of sites that are not good. Especially sites that advertise shipping policiesfor christmas in february.

 

Posted by Duke at February 16, 2007 08:45

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