Comments on: Google Penalty For Low-Quality Writing?

By: silver

silver — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:53:50 +0000

There are probably some easily-detectable hallmarks of auto-generated text which differentiate from “non-English scholar” writing.

However, I’d still say that many users find frequent grammar and spelling mistakes irritating.

If, as you say, it’s badly-written, yet good content — Google would probably let other signals inform their algorithm to give it more weight despite writing mistakes. For instance, if the blog achieved lots of links and mentions and such.

I wasn’t at all saying this was the end-all and be-all of Google ranking factors. Yet, it could be one of the hundreds they are employing.

By: Web Design Toronto

Web Design Toronto — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:44:45 +0000

There is no way this can be true. If I decided to open up a blog but I’m not an “english scholar” as my grade 10 teacher once said, google will punish me? even though I may be putting in some great content that users love. Give me a break, they will not do this.

By: Brent

Brent — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:44:34 +0000

I agree with Dev Basu some of the text spinning software is coming of age and becoming more sophisticated in crafting meaningful sentences.

By: Does Good Writing Affect Your Search Egnine Rankings?

Does Good Writing Affect Your Search Egnine Rankings? — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:40:40 +0000

[...] now or will matter in the near future. This week, Chris Silver Smith wrote an article called “Google Penalty for Low-Quality Writing?” about just this issue. Chris has been writing about Google’s tools, including their usability [...]

By: MiriamEllis

MiriamEllis — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:49:10 +0000

Hi Chris,
I’d bake a cake the day it was proved Google was using writing quality as a ranking factor. From an aesthetic viewpoint, you would think that this could be seen as the MOST important factor of a document. I have always thought that Google used inbound links as a sort of substitute for this, figuring that if people link to a document, it must be good. But, it would be so much more satisfying if there were a direct evaluation of the copy itself. That being said…most spellchekers still don’t know that words like ‘blog’ and ‘Google’ are real, so we have a ways to go with those.

Really nice article!

By: Dev Basu - Powered by Search

Dev Basu - Powered by Search — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:21:42 +0000

The spinning software out there is getting pretty damn sophisticated too. I’ve heard of some internet marketers being able to generate spun text that actually sounds real and would pass a human review.

By: Andrew Shotland

Andrew Shotland — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:29:45 +0000

Seems like there would be some algo ways to test bad quality writing per your post, but I think there are a lot of signals that could point to a block of text put on a page specifically for keyword spamming. It would be interesting to see how the manual reviewers react to seeing these elements on a page since sometimes it’s unclear if the publisher is truly keyword spamming or is just a poor UI designer.

By: Al Sefati

Al Sefati — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:24:03 +0000

Thank you for the article. With caffeine live right now, I would think Google would be too busy to determine each posts and human audit billions of pages that go lives each day but there are a good few factors that determined if the content is written for users or not.

Google denies using analytic data as ranking but I have hard time believing them as I suspect they use bounce rates and etc as factors to see if users likes the content or not and if the users don’t like spend much time reading a blog post then that could mean low quality post.

But then again one could argue that post was so good that converted user into customer or it was to the point and easy to read.

By: seobro

seobro — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:15:21 +0000

OK, you mean those word salad keyword dumps that try to appear as content generated by real users? Or are you talking about grads from 7-11 university that did major in an new language known as apu?

Google could try to filter out some of the MFA spam. They would “MAKE FOR BERRY BERRY HAPPY” users.

By: silver

silver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:02:19 +0000

Ryan, there are some existing patents that Google has which specifically state length of text as important. I’ve seen this mainly in the area of assessing importance, authority and trust of online reviews that people may write about businesses, but it would make sense that an assessment of text length must be incorporated in some way. I think that the relative amount of text on a page, and its arrangement, could algorithmically define whether a document is an article or not.