Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites

This is an ‘old’ post on the Official Webmaster Central Blog from May 2011. I know, the world of search engines moves so fast that this must be of limited use now, correct?

Well sometimes it can be very useful to look over older posts – especially in light of what eventually happened. Here, Google sets out it’s ideas on how we should all be approaching the building of high quality sites and points out that the Panda update (that had just started) was but one programme of algorithm tweaks amongst many.

The post sets out the sort of questions the Google engineers ask themselves before setting forth on developing the changes that are required to identify (and hence remove) lower quality sites from the index (aka Panda). And they suggest we should all ask ourselves the same questions as we move forward with our own sites. In May 2011 we obviously were not aware of the massive changes that were to hit in the Spring of 2012, and as a consequence we (maybe) did not pay as much attention to these guidelines as we should have done? Well, take another look now – it makes very useful reading.

In particular, I like one of the closing statements that says “..  low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”

What do you think? Post your comments and own experiences below . . . . .

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