Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

SEOmoz Blog | A List of Web Page Quality Signals

SEOmoz gave a list of some web page quality signals today. They are:

Intrinsic Features:

How accurate is the information presented?
How biased or unbiased is the data?
How believable is the content?
How credible is the source?
Contextual Features:

Is the information relevant to the user’s query?
Does the information add value to the subject?
Is the work recent enough to be of value?
Is the source thorough in its presentation?
What amount of information is provided?
Representational Features:

Can the material be interpreted in different way
How easy or difficult is the material for a user to understand?
Does the document state the information concisely?
Is the source consistent?
Accessibility Features:

Is the document accessible?
Does the content present security risks?

When creating a site, these are valuable things to keep in mind. Specifically, you should try to create value-adding, thorough, regularly updating content that is accessible, has a privacy policy and doesn’t use vulnerable code. Search engines probably have a hard time knowing if content is thorough… only that thorough sites tend to be XXX pages with XXX words per page and XX off-site links, but even those sorts of rules have to be a mild signal for Google because there is so much variation. Google clearly values updated content over stale content and I haven’t seen any clear signal showing that Google likes accessible pages or those with privacy policies any better than any others (but it can’t hurt). The only ‘trick’ to be sure of that I see from this is to make sure that pages you create change in some way each time Googlebot visits (I like putting links to recent relevant news storys on the page via RSS). About that quality content, Google can’t tell but people can. Good content attracts backlinks. Backlinks are SEO gold.