Can Google Tell The Difference Between A Good and Bad Content?

Before I ventured into digital marketing, I barely had an insight into the pro and cons of online content and Google in general; how Google selected suitable contents and displayed them as results were sublime.

As I began my online courses in Google Fundamentals of Digital Marketing, I gradually understood the metrics of Google and the importance of writing and publishing good content online. However, the same question went through my mind over and over again.

Can Google tell the difference between good and bad content?

The answer is yes!

Google ranks no.1 among search engines on the internet and to stay at the top (despite the fact that they are leading the charts by a large margin) Google has to ensure that whoever searches the internet through them gets the best search results.

To do this, Google developed algorithms used to assess content, filter quality contents, debunk poor or bad content. Simply put, Google algorithms are focused on crawling, indexing and ranking as much quality content existing on the internet as possible.

According to Google, a website’s content is good if:

The content is well-written

The content educates.

The content does not mislead

The content delivers on the promise of the page title or heading

The content increases your conversion rate

On the other hand, Google considers a content to be bad when:

Content has doorway pages

Cloaking

Content contains hidden text or links

Content is lifted as it is from other websites or blogs

Pages and blog posts are unnecessarily stuffed with keywords

Your content is good if it has the qualities of good content and it is bad if it is characterized by bad attributes.

It is of utmost importance to Google that people who search the internet through them are served with good content and to achieve this Google creates updates to the algorithms used to assess contents published online.

In 2001, Google released the Toolbar which one can say birthed the SEO, as it gave webmasters an easy way to measure success. By 2003–2004, Google had announced two more algorithm updates and launched three newer updates. These updates penalized sites for using old-school SEO techniques like stuffing pages full of invisible text as a way to include more keywords.

In the year 2011, when Google announced a new update PANDA; an algorithm designed to filter websites with low-quality content and debunk them so that they would appear less often on SERPs.

As internet users began to search Google more frequently on their mobiles, Google updated its algorithms to rank websites whose content were mobile friendly.

It is known that Google updates their algorithms 500 to 600 times a year although some of these updates are major and given names, others take place over time but are still significant.

Google needs to be sure that any result displayed after the search button is clicked, is of good quality.