{"id":267,"date":"2011-10-08T16:13:30","date_gmt":"2011-10-08T16:13:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danaprincewriting.com\/blog\/?p=267"},"modified":"2011-10-30T18:11:54","modified_gmt":"2011-10-30T18:11:54","slug":"web-content-quality-google-borg-hive-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danaprincewriting.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/08\/web-content-quality-google-borg-hive-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Content Quality, Google Panda, and The Borg Hive Mind Mentality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Want to be in Google’s good books? Write good web content. Does Google care how good your website’s content is? Yes. Google wants to be sure that it is sending traffic to good content<\/em>. If people don’t get what they want from the Google search engine results pages, they’ll stop using it and advertisers will stop paying Google money to advertise for them.<\/p>\n

Does Google know if your web content is good or not? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. The Google Panda<\/a> updates are proof of that. How does Google know what’s good and what’s not? By multiple methods, one of which is via judging user behaviour. If people tweet it, link to it, hit the +1 button, click through to another link on the page, comment on it, opt-in, bookmark it, and so on… this tells Google that the content is getting attention. It’s popular or good, it’s relevant, and deserves to be read by others. The search engines put a lot of stock in user behaviour. That’s one of the reasons that blog posts with a lot of comments rank so well, for instance. Search engines are results-driven. They are expected to continue to fine-tune their algorithms to meet user expectations.<\/p>\n

Google pays attention to positive results. Conversely, if people bounce off the page they land on, mark comments as spam, and generally ignore the content, this speaks volumes to search engines as well.<\/p>\n

Google – Hive Mind Mentality<\/h2>\n

If you’re a Star Trek fan, think of Google a bit like the Borg Queen.\u00a0 Google, as the Borg Queen, looks to the hive for reactions and assimilates that information and disseminates it. Those reactions are gauged to determine the overall opinion of a website and its individual pages. Google looks at multiple factors to determine if the hive believes your pages are using white hat or black hat tactics and to determine how to categorize you. If you’re not aware of the Borg, think of a bee hive that shares information and recommendations. That bee hive has the power to influence what the queen (aka: Yahoo, Bing, Google) thinks and the queen then\u00a0 influences the hive’s activities with further suggestions. Resistance (to quality) is futile.<\/p>\n

No matter which way you look at it, your web site’s content quality matters.<\/p>\n