In May, Google announced on their blog a post called More guidance on building high-quality sites. In this blog post they had listed 23 questions you should ask yourself or a visited site to determine if the content is high quality or not. I like to take these questions and apply them to Ehow.com to see if they really deserved the pounding they got from Google. So let’s go!
Here are the questions:
questions you should ask yourself and consider when trying to understand why a site was impacted by this update. I am a golfer so I did a search on Google “How to hit a draw golf shot + ehow.com” and came up with this article http://www.ehow.com/how_1166_hit-draw-shot.html . So now let’s take this article and use Google’s questions to see how it pans out. Here are the questions:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article? – The article was written by “an Ehow contributor” so how are you suppose to trust this?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature? Again, this is written by “an Ehow contributor” and this article consists of 6 bullet points on how to do this. I wish hitting a draw was only that easy!
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Yes, there are at least 7 different articles that talk about hitting a draw with slight variation.
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site? I could people doing that (if they had something to buy on the site) but I would not as there is no trust badges or phone numbers that would shows visitors trust.
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors? Actually, it is not all that bad.
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? Yes. I mean this is not a golf site or a site specifically designed around golf shots.
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis? No, not really.
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? No, I would rate this content low compared to other golf sites or forums.
- How much quality control is done on content? Not much.
- Does the article describe both sides of a story? NA.
- Is the site a recognized authority on its topic? No.
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care? The content is mass produced.
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? 6 bullet points I would say is hastily produced. Wouldn’t you?
- For a health related query, would you trust information from this site? NA.
- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? No, I consider these types of sites as Swiss army knives as they have a ton of tools but none of them are very good.
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic? I wish it did as if hitting a draw was only that easy.
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? Nope.
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? Nope.
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? Oh yeah it does but honestly I blame Google for these types of sites.
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? The magazine would lose 90% of all subscribers if this was in a golf magazine.
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics? Yep!
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail? Nope.
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site? The ones who came to my site to receive quality information, yes. The others who try to blog spam, no.
So not to bad actually. 19 out of 23 meet the need that Google has establish as a thin content driven site!.
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