411Locals has always been very responsible when it comes to the quality of website content it produces, and we always aim at creating content of authority. That is why we are always up-to-date on this topic. In this article, we will tell you how Google fights the issue with search quality. Examples of problematic content are fake news, disturbing answers, or offensive search suggestions which appear at the top of Google’s results.
What could the solution be? To begin searching for this answer, we must first explain how Google measures the authority of a website content. To begin with, there is no single “authority” metric. Instead, Google considers various undisclosed metrics, for which it is even possible to vary depending on the query.
PageRank – the first authority metric:
In the dawn of Google, the search engine had only one authority figure – PageRank. What it did was look at the links leading to pages. The search engine counted the number of links received by a page, which helped Google derive a PageRank score for this page.
But rewarding pages with many links was not all Google did. It also attempted to assess the importance of those links. Pages with links from other “important” pages ranked higher than pages with multiple links from not so authoritative other pages.
Even pages with much authority — a high PageRank — couldn’t always make it to the top of Google’s search results. PageRank was only one aspect of the ranking algorithm of Google. The actual words within links were of great importance. The words on the web pages themselves also mattered, as well as other factors. (more…)
