When talking about producing best websites with best value, one cannot deny that they have to pass Google quality assessment. To classify sites, Google usually issues their quality update monthly and as a web developer, you surely wish your site will be qualified as a high quality, right? Therefore, you have to know how Google classifies Webpages as ‘Low Quality’. Knowing what makes webpage considered as low quality is as important as knowing what makes it considered as high quality, so to prevent your sites from getting low rank, you can read the following information.
Excessive & Unnatural Internal Structural Links
Since early of 2012, Google has been talking about its low-quality criteria list when they filed a patent that directly targets websites repeating internal links across sidebars and footers. This was actually a part of SEO technique, but now it has become an unnatural form of SERP manipulation.
You can see some obvious signs when a website is untrustworthy, like it’s been hacked or it’s full of spam comments and spam pages. There are some less obvious factors that Google considers it as low quality signals.
Phantom 2
As Google keeps updating its algorithm, we began to see a change in Google’s algorithm in the end of April 2015 where in May 2015 was dubbed the Phantom 2 update. Many webmasters speculate that Phantom 2 is made to examine the newly patented low-quality criteria list, a lot of websites with poor quality content saw upwards of a 10 percent decrease in organic search traffic.
Over-Monetization of Content
Google considers most websites to be designed to trick users, search engines, or both. If Google determine your web as a part of this kind of websites, then they will record your web as the lowest quality. In fact, Google has taken greater steps to cater for high volume search queries that don’t have a single dominant interpretation.
Ads & Affiliate Links
Regarding to ads and affiliate links, you should make sure that the main focus of the page is its main content, so users shouldn’t have to scroll past affiliate links and ads or interact with intrusive overlays. For example, Taboola and Outbrand which blend in with the page, this design makes them look like they belong to the page and increase’s users trust. However, the bad side is, it will affect your quality ranking.
E-commerce Trust Factors
Another issue that you have put to underline is the lack of attention to detail e-commerce hygiene pages and hygiene content. Below are some pages that you should consider the most.
Financial Transaction Pages
Good transaction pages do not only have to contain cart/checkout and subsequent stages on the website, but these pages should also contain prominent links to standard e-commerce hygiene pages or any page that allows a user to “purchase’ or add a product to their cart/basket. Furthermore, as this page can be considered as the most important user pages, you should develop it with the best effort possible.
Financial Information Pages
Don’t forget to create a high quality content for your finance content, financing product purchases on your own site, or content and information that can insure products or services. High quality content should contain keywords and understand the relationship between keywords and content.
The bottom line of this article is, in order to get your SEO basics right, make sure that your pages and internal linking structures serve users very well, so that it doesn’t pass link equity to the money pages, especially for e-commerce and brochure service websites.