Original Content - Quality vs Quantity

[Gordon23]

We all know that content is king but really it should be said that original content is king...

Original content always trumps PLR content but can Google really tell the difference between quality, original content and just original, not so quality content.

I read recently that shortish (450 word) unique, quality content articles rank better than long not so quality articles.

As a niche content writer I understand that customers can tell quality from shaff and it would be great in my opinion if Google could too.

Can Google algorithms tell the difference between quality original content and just standard fare but original content?

 

[jcorkern]

Can Google algorithms tell the difference between quality original content and just standard fare but original content?

Yes it can, and does. To what degree, we are not sure, but it would not be that difficult to do it to any level, as long as they want to allocate the resources to parse that much info.

A 3 year old uses a different vocabulary than a 13 year old, and they are completely different from a 30 year old with a college degree. So they could have words that are commonly used by people in college and grade on that type of curve, they could use punctuation as another. 3 year old punctuation is different from the 13 year old... and on it goes.

There are many ways they can do this, exactly how remains to be seen.

Now, the tolerances may be different from one keyword to the next based on a host of other factors. One major one would be demographics.

Google understands demographics fully, and also know that a PhD writing for a high school grad is likely to yield little results unless his "PhD" or "authority" is what he is riding on, like a doctor or a scientist. I am pretty sure that google fits the content to the users as much as possible into their algo to some degree.

To show you a really simple method, word count could be a major factor. i am sure you can not write a scholarly article in 300 words or less, but you may in 1000 to 4500 words.

They are doing it to some degree, but the factors will never be fully known, because once the hole is found and exploited, they will change it again.

Now, What I really believe is that it is determined by bounce rate more so than grammar.

If your grammar is bad, you will likely get a much higher bounce rate, so if this is the case, they catch poor content by default.

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[Y0yOy0]

Well, I'm not sure if they can really say "ok this content is true" or "ok this guy is talking ********". What they can tell for sure is something called "level of reading". It is probably dependant on the ammount of common/uncommon words in your article. If you look at google advanced search, they have a criteria "search by level of reading". So they can tell if an article is writen for kids or for professors, thats for sure.

As to the "original content" I am not sure anymore.. For the first time I created a website which uses 100% of duplicate content (syndicated by RSS from another website). It has been 1 month since I launched it and it got streight to PR4, and getting good hits from google.. still waiting to get penalized for duplicate content and loose SERP/PR but for now my website keeps climbing the serps.

I think..it might be because my page is completely in Bulgarian language and maybe they cannot yet handle weird languages ^^

 

[jcorkern]

Panda is not world wide yet, so you can count on that blog full of duplicate content to go away as soon as they roll panda out in your country. You can bet on it.