Recognizing Quality Links

Good Morning Quality Gal Writers!

It’s Monday morning and the beginning of a new week. The QualityGal team just wanted to share with all of you 2 helpful resources that should help many of you when you’re searching for information and/or links for articles.

The first resource comes from Google, the search engine that most of you (along with the rest of the world) likely use to search for information and links. As some of you may or may not know, in late February of this year, Google updated their algorithm that determines how websites appear in their search engine results pages (SERPs). The update, known as Panda, was part of a broader attempt by Google to recognize and differentiate between high quality and low quality websites. While Google’s algorithm is a closely-guarded secret, they have in the past shared some of their motives and lines of reasoning for making such changes.

One interesting offering from Google came from a senior member of their search engine department, Amit Singhal. Amit shared a list of 23 questions that Google came up with to determine whether or not a website was high quality or low quality in their opinion. Among some of those questions were these:

  • Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
  • Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
  • Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
  • Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  • For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
  • Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?

The full list of Amit’s Question’s can be found here. Since the QualityGal team is focused on delivering  accurate, authoritative content on a wide variety of topics, we recommend that you print these questions out and keep them near your desk and/or computer. Whenever you’re in doubt about whether or not a site is high quality or not, you can run through the list of questions to guide you. And if you’re still stuck, you can always contact the QualityGal team!

The second resource we’d like to share with all of you is a list of sites that were “bumped” downward in search engine rankings after the Panda update. Some of these websites may be familiar to you, as you’ve probably run across at least a few of them when searching for information on assigned topics. We’re sharing these websites with you because the main reason(s) they were bumped downward by Google is that they couldn’t pass the stringent “test” that Google set forth in Amit’s list of 23 questions.

Since they were bumped downward by Google, it’s less likely now that you will come across them when searching for information on different topics, but in case you do, please be aware that these are not deemed as high-quality websites by Google. Now, we don’t believe that Google is the ultimate arbiter of what’s high quality and what’s not, but we do find Amit’s list of 23 questions to be very relevant and helpful in that regard. We advise you to take a look at the list and try to avoid these types of sites when searching for information and/or links.

We hope those two resources can help all of you when searching for accurate, authoritative information. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the QualityGal staff via email.

– The QualityGal Team

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Posted in Finding Good Links, Training, Writing Tips
4 comments on “Recognizing Quality Links
  1. Panda is hitting everything pretty hard!

  2. I like these tips and I am making my copies. Thanks for this helpful resource. Quality Gal is always on it.

  3. Lorelei Nettles says:

    Since links are a sore spot for me, I will print these out. Thanks!

  4. Nearly every client I work for blacklists these sites as non-authoritative. There’s just too much room for error, which is one reason that I stick with QG.