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CHAPTER 10

10. High Quality Pages

In chapter 4, we have already discussed the high quality page. In this chapter, we will zoom in
on this and learn how to set up a high quality page ourselves.
Google places great value on the quality of a web page. Many ranking factors are related to this.
But what is "high quality" and how can Google determine whether a page is of high quality?

10.1 Human raters

From its inception, Google has been concerned with measuring quality. The original idea of
measuring quality on the basis of the number of links to a website (PageRank) did not work suffi-
ciently well. An alternative had to be developed. Two questions were central to its development:

1. What is quality?
2. How can you measure this quality?

Quality is a broad concept. What is good quality for one person is bad quality for another. In
order to still get a good picture of what people generally perceive as quality, Google initially
uses "human raters". Human beings of flesh and blood, not computers. To these raters (there
are about 10,000), who are often employed by Google as self-employed workers, hundreds of
websites are shown. These web sites fall into different categories. Different requirements are
set for a web shop than for an informative website about volcanoes. These web sites are then
assessed by means of questionnaires. Below is a small overview of the type of questions the
evaluators are asked.

Quality according to Google:

• Would you trust the information in this article?
• Was this article written by an expert or amateur with a lot of knowledge on the subject, or
is it more superficial?
• Are there duplicate, overlapping or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with
slightly different keywords?
• Would you give your credit card details on this site?
• Does this article contain spelling or stylistic errors or incorrect facts?
• Are the topics chosen because of genuine interest from readers of the site, or does the site
generate content to gauge which content does well in search engines?
• Does the article contain original content or information, an original report or research or
an original analysis?
• Does the page offer added value compared to other pages in the search results?
• How many quality controls are carried out on the content?
• Does the article describe several sides of a story or different points of view?

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