Category: Martech

The guidelines of Google Quality Rating seem to be increasingly relevant after the latest updates and if you want to be top in search engines you can no longer ignore the reputation acquired and that you will succeed in acquiring online.

Chris Smith, president of Argent Media, had predicted everything you will read in this article back in 2007 when he said that Google could use the quality scoring for organic rankings, proposing a whole series of changes to be made to the websites, mainly focused on quality factor.

According to Google, over the years Google would have applied a Quality Score, identifying factors such as a page “about us” that is precise and detailed, a contact page that introduces trust, good usability and user experience, clear use of copyright and a good spelling and grammar, just some of the fundamental factors that we then saw to have been the path taken by Google for the evolution of the algorithm.

The most recent edition of Google’s “Quality Evaluators Guideline”, also called “Quality Rating Guideline” (“QRG”) is almost a script of its previous recommendations regarding quality factors.

Google’s “Quality Rating Guidelines” are increasingly relevant after the latest updates

Discordant voices also from official Google sources seem to bounce on the importance or not of the reputation, going from the same  Danny Sullivan  who confirmed that the evaluations of the  human evaluators are not used in the automatic learning of the algorithms, while  Marie Haynes explained how it considers that the elements mentioned in the guidelines for quality assessment may be factors that influence the ranking, such as a company’s BBB ranking and the reputation of the authors.

At the same time, Googlers have increasingly advised webmasters to “focus only on quality”, and even recommend webmasters to read QRGs to offer the best possible content, just as Sullivan himself did when he officially commented on the updates of the basic algorithm of last October.

But then how does Google determine the quality in an algorithmic way starting from the concepts of competence, authority, reliability, and reputation that seem very subjective?

The Google algorithms have to translate these concepts into measurable criteria that can be measured and compared between sites/pages competing.

Chris Smith believes that some of Google’s previous algorithmic developments probably point towards this process, interpreting a certain degree of disconnection between what people asked and how the various Googlers responded and how people themselves interpreted these answers.

If Google instructs its human raters to evaluate the EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) of a site but does not incorporate the resulting evaluations, what is the algorithm that uses the algorithm?

Simply stating that the algorithm uses a collection of things like a BBB assessment, user reviews or link trust analysis, even if that answer seems too limited. Also, to say that Google provides a quality assessment based solely on link trust analysis and query analysis seems too limited.

That’s why by deduction we could say that Google is obviously taking into account some factors that go beyond a more advanced analysis of links/queries, even if this still remains a fundamental part of the mix.

The website quality patent from Google

One of the many Google patents we talked about months ago is based on machine learning. Noted by Bill Slawski it is the ” Website Quality Signal Generation “. In synopsis, it said how human beings could be used to assess the quality of websites, and therefore the analysis algorithm could associate those evaluations with website signals, probably automatically identifying the relationships between quantified signals and values of human evaluation, generating models with characteristic signals. These signal patterns could then be used to compare signals with other websites not evaluated to apply quality scores to them.

The wording is rather fascinating: “Raters connect to the Internet websites and rate of quality of the websites. The raters can submit quality ratings to server analysis through the rating input device. The quality analysis server receives website quality ratings the website quality ratings are associated with a uniform resource locator and other website signals corresponding to the rated website. The quality analysis server identifies relationships between website quality ratings and website signals and creates a model representing relationships, as described below.

As you will have noticed some of the same things mentioned above are mentioned in the QRG. But this is not the reason why the patent is so convincing, but because it provides a very logical framework in which to develop methods to evaluate the quality of websites and web pages, and to generate a Quality Score that can be used in the determinations of ranking. The methods in question indicate that relatively small sets of test pages could be used to create models that could work well on all other similar or similar pages.

Imagine that you have identified a type of page for which you want to create a quality score, such as an informative article on a health topic. Google could take the signals we mentioned earlier including the amount of content, page layout, number of ads and ad placement on the page, site reviews, reviews and links to content created on other sites, the links off the page (perhaps indicating the identity of the content creator and / or citing reference information sources), site and page links (PageRank), clickthrough rates the page from its first keyword searches, the correspondence of the title visible at the top of the page with the content of the page and the title of the research fragment and the meta description as well as the factors that indicate that the site is up-and-up.

By testing numbers of similar page types, Google may have developed a model of combining quality signals and developed a score value associated with it.

In essence, when a page of an article on a health topic has a certain range of criteria such as PageRank, plus a certain layout of the content, plus a certain PageRank, plus CTR, more user reviews, plus lots of other factors then Google could apply the calculated Quality Score on the page without any human being reviewing it manually.

Interpreting the diagram published above with a broader interpretation, we could hypothesize that thanks to automatic learning the system could identify more complex relationships (like assigning a certain quality score if the PageRank is N to NN, CTR is X to XX, coupled with a specific type of page layout) and not, for example, saying that an article on a health topic evaluated with a certain level of quality assessment should have a minimum PageRank of X, a minimum number of links, etc. .

In fact, it is the same patent that describes this possibility, right when he says that “in some implementations, the model can be derived from the web site signals and from the web site quality assessment using a submachine learning that implements a support vector regression “.

In essence, this produces an automatic learning classifier. The model can, therefore, be used to identify all the pages of a common class, calculate a quality score and then apply the same or similar evaluation to other pages of the same class and/or category.

Many other SEO analysts have long been saying that Google is incorporating machine learning into content rankings (see Eric Enge and Mark Traphagan), and not just in interpreting the queries that Google has publicly revealed.

This really explains some of the inconsistencies we have seen in Google’s search results for months. The neural networks seem to produce very holistic scores, so aim for any signal or even a handful of signals that most influence the outcome in a given case would probably not really possible.

The various possible signals that probably incorporate the Quality Score also have a certain complexity

• PageRank – and/or some evolved signal that can also involve the quality/trust of links;
• User Reviews Sentiment – Google’s QRG suggests that there would be a certain threshold of reviews, so if a business/website had relatively few total reviews, they could most likely be rated as unrepresentative. So, if Google is incorporating reputation, how else could they adjust the ranking if they don’t do some kind of sentiment analysis? Of all the rather nebulous quality assessments, the feeling is relatively simple to analyze and use.
• Mention Sentiment – Do people mention a product in social media and e-mail? The “buzz” of social media is a measure of popularity and even feeling can be a measure of quality.
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – (and relative bounce rate) there was a lot of debate about this potential factor over time, but like the Quality Score itself, if used by the Quality Score of the ads, why not also for organic rankings?
• On the other hand, if it is only a part of a website’s Quality Score, then CTR is not a direct ranking factor and this could explain the discrepancies in the search results.
• Percentage of Ad Placements – How much of the total space on the page consists of ads? Google may have calculated a minimum / maximum threshold. Also, how many ads are on a page and how much do they split the main content of the page? Are there gaps or overlaps that cannot be closed? Do the ads follow while scrolling the page?
• Missing sites Identification information- Sites should ideally have “About” and “Contact Us” pages. About the sections, they should explain who the company is and, even better, list the most important staff members along with the photos. The “contacts” page should ideally have as much contact information as possible, including addresses, phone numbers, and contact submission forms. It probably helps if the staff pages are linked to employee social media and LinkedIn profiles and vice versa. There is nothing worse than visiting a site and not being able to see who’s behind it!
• Critical E-Commerce and Financial Site Factor- The HTTPS protocol is a fact – but it is also true that Google goes beyond the simple checking-off if you have HTTPS but since not all configurations and encryption are the same as E-Commerce and financial information sites must also have clear Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy and customer service contact information. In addition, they must include the Help sections and the Goods Return Policies. Even if Google does not use the trust badge as a quality factor, it is still important to have it to reassure consumers online and can increase sales by increasing trust.
• Site speed – this is almost taken for granted, but it has always been a factor in the PPC Quality Score, and it is still a type of quality measurement in organic research.

How the PageRank Score calculation method could be used

Another interesting aspect of how the Quality Score could work is that the Quality Score of a page could also incorporate the Quality Score of the other pages that link to it or to its domain.

The Quality Score could partly be calculated by iterating over the entire graph of the link a number of times in the calculation of the scores, using a method similar to the original algorithm of PageRank. This would produce a more weighted scale of the Quality Score values, helping to ensure that the highest quality content is truly at the top, completely burying the lowest quality content to the point where research is virtually never encountered in typical interactions of research.

Comments on some sites affected by Medic Update

Barry Schwartz published a handful of sites affected by the Medic Update, and observing them it was noted that most of the above criteria were missing as the potential quality factors and that the QRG specifically mentions:

• com – He had no page. Infinite scroll. The “Contact Us” page was on a different domain. A reputation of article writers not necessarily experts in medical subjects. Very large ads and lateral grotesque and distracting badges.
• org – Redirect, cartoon images on the staff page, no text, no phone/address. The contact form appears only after a human click of validation.
• com – Customer service contact telephone number that is difficult to locate and that can be connected to a subdomain.
• com – Information on the page redirects to the homepage! No phone/address /personal address. There was also a strange graphics code of the logo.

Mixed messages with respect to ranking signals

Some of the potential signals we have mentioned have been quite controversial but they could rightly explain why there is a major divergence on what some SEO professionals believe are classification factors and what the Googlers argue.

Chris Smith also believes that the Googlers sometimes played a semantic game. The presence of one or more controversial factors (CTR, sentiment analysis, etc.) is not direct ranking factors because these factors may or may not turn into a complex assessment that results in a Quality Score. And he continues his thoughts by saying that, for example, “if my conjectures on the Quality Score are close to how it works, then two different pages on the same topic could be very similar and both have a high CTR, but the Quality Score of one or two could be significantly higher due to a combination of other factors. In other cases, still, a higher CTR could move a page upwards to be classified at a higher quality level “.

A model of a good quality page sounds like a ” search recipe “, as Danny Sullivan himself defined it. There are therefore different combinations and weightings of the factors used to determine the quality scores of the different types of pages.

And that’s why, taking up the holistic concept mentioned in the article, Chris Smith defines Quality Score as a gesture. This is why Googlers have recommended unclear changes for sites affected by the latest updates, such as “working to improve overall quality” and “focusing on making the best possible content”. Apart from technical SEO problems, it is rarely possible to change one or two things throughout the site to improve low-quality scores. As Glenn Gabe observed on the sites affected by these changes, “site owners should not look for a single smoking gun, as there is almost never one.”

How to improve the quality score of your site

How can knowing that Quality Score is a complex Gestalt can help improve the ranking?

The good news is that most of the SEO guidelines are still very current. A good SEO approach must always reside in the technical SEO construction, keeping error pages and pages without content to a minimum. Eliminate pages of thin and superfluous content. Avoid prohibited link building practices.

SEO itself is a holistic practice, and as such it constantly needs to be done all the things that are appropriate and reasonably feasible to optimize any website. That’s why it’s important to use great online SEO tools for your website optimization.

Certainly, all the elements that reassure consumers are of vital importance: information on the pages, on the contact pages, on the pages of the Privacy Policy and on the Terms and Conditions, contact options of the customer service, as well as, if necessary, updating the contents.

Nothing should be left to chance, displaying the site as if you were a user, trying to completely satisfy the needs of real users, responding to negative reviews and trying to get online reviews from satisfied users/customers.

Finally, it is necessary to practice proactive reputation management working to positively involve the community, both online and offline, in a coherent way over time. Engage with social media and develop your presence through these channels. Provide free good advice as online experts to build your reputation. Become a member of professional groups in your sector and community groups. Respond in a professional way and don’t fall into online provocations.

So here we are at the end, remembering that all these practices will generate the signals for a good quality score over time and the benefits will soon arrive.

Author Bio

Wanda Mooree run’s professional SEO authority services firm in Texas. Also spends a lot of his free time educating the minds of thousands of young Texas SEO and top agencies. She is a featured author at various authoritative blogs in the health and fitness industry and currently associated as a blogger with Justseotech.com

The fact that most of the debtors find them in the vicious cycle of debt is primarily because they fall prey to their own devices. One such bad habit is procrastination from time to time. Most people think that they will repay a loan easily and on time and take on a loan but seldom find things happening in their favor or as they wanted to.

This is because most loans, especially the credit card debts carry on huge rate of interest that is accrued on the principal balance. The most worrying part and the most overlooked one as well is that this interest gets accrued at a compound rate that eventually results in a debt amount as high as the sky.

This is when people look for alternative options to repay their debt and get rid of those annoying and often embarrassing collection calls. In such situations they find that there are two most favorable options available:

• One is to consolidate their debts with a bigger loan at a lower rate of interest and longer terms and
• The other is to settle the debt for a reduced amount and pay it off one time or in installments is the creditors allow doing so.

Now, given the fact that the outstanding loan amount will be significantly reduced, most people opt for debt settlement without even knowing much about it or going through the debt settlement reviews to look at the bigger picture and its consequences. This is another mistake that is often committed by the debtors who love to delay debt payments.

Therefore, when it comes to managing your finances you must make sure that you avoid delaying so that things do not quickly become too expensive for you to handle.

Give up procrastination

This is basic. Since your life is busy you will find less time to deal with your debt given the fact that there are lots of things such as the due amount and due date to remember. However, there is no denial of the fact that you will have to pay the price for your delay or forgetting to pay your bills on time by having to pay enormously in the end.

Irrespective of whatever is the reason behind your procrastination, it will lead to a financial mess eventually. Make sure you move it to the forefront of the to-do list. Even if you are a habitual procrastinator, you must make sure that this is a doable thing by espousing a few small changes in your habits to achieve far bigger results down the line.

Better automate things

If you are predisposed to procrastination it is best to automate things as much as possible. This will keep your payments on top of all things and save you from feeling overwhelmed. This is the best approach to take especially if you have multiple creditors to pay every month.

Automating your payments will also help you to avoid late fees and charges. Therefore make sure that you:

• Set up text or email alerts to know when the payments are due
• To know when there are any changes in the minimum payment amount.

You can set up such automatic payments with the lender directly or through the bill pay tool of your bank. All you have to do for this is to make sure that you have enough money in your account so that there are no deficits of funds to cover the amount you owe.

Consolidate your debts

This is one best way for the habitual procrastinators to pay off their multiple bills. This approach will have several benefits to offer such as:

• Your multiple bills will be reduced to only one
• You will have lower payment to make to one single creditor only and
• You will avoid miss outs and therefore accrued interests and fines.

This will make life as well as your finance management much easier offering you a lot of mental peace and lots of sleep at nights.

Credit card management

Most people have multiple credit cards and use all of them in a month and find them in huge debt in the end. As a prudent person, if you are using credit cards for your purchases, make sure that you keep only two credit cards active at any given time.

• One of this should be of lower interest rate so that you can use it for bigger purchases and get a scope to revolve a balance and
• The other credit card to use for anything else including earning rewards.

Make sure that you pay off the balance in full well within the interest-free period.

Assuming that you have multiple high-interest credit card balances, check out whether or not you qualify for a 0% balance transfer. Though most credit card balance transfer will charge you a 3% fee added to your transferred amount, such an approach often makes financial sense, especially if you are prone to procrastination.

Just make sure you create a proper and effective repayment plan to reduce the balance as much as you can within the no-interest period. This will direct all your payments towards the principal till the time the 0% offer is not expired.

Turn to technology

Technology does not only make your work easier and faster but it may also change your behavior as well. This is very helpful for a procrastinator as they find it very difficult relying on their willpower. If you turn to websites and apps it will help you to change your unhealthy behaviors and transform your bad habits into good ones.

There are even a few apps that will aggregate information regarding multiple accounts. These apps will help you to see the amount due and outstanding on a weekly or a monthly basis. Based on the information you can plan your moves accordingly. Just make sure that you set proper reminders so that you can log in regularly.

Remember, dealing with procrastination is difficult but not impossible. All you need to do is break things down into small, simpler and doable tasks to see big improvements in your finances.

Website development is one of the most successful businesses in the digital era. The age of information in the new millennium has helped countless businesses take over a significant portion of the market. From brands like Nike to Apple, Amazon to Netflix all of them has utilized the power of creativity in design for their company. Look at these larger than life companies initiate a sense of optimism and awaken hope for a web development firm that everything will go as planned without any glitches.

While a positive mindset may help you achieve your goals, it is often not enough to help you succeed. In particular cases like the web developing industry, the market is too saturated for its own good. Competition is ideal for any industry, but a plethora of options even in the rarest of niches sets the present companies in the market for disaster.

Web development and design is the field of creativity, innovation, and for people who strive to achieve complex goals. Finding success in any field is possible by following the right steps and remaining motivated on the path. So if you are in the web industry and are aiming to succeed, here is a list of the top practices that will help you out.

Creating a plan of action

This may seem like common sense, but quite often, ambitious web designers fail to look at the bigger picture before starting the work of coding and creating. Constant rewriting of the website code is a waste of time and energy that can be easily avoided by having a prior plan in place. It is suggested that you must understand your priorities. A keen understanding of purpose is necessary to find success.

Prioritizing the user experience

As a professional creating custom web design, you must be aware of crucial user experience is to any site. Smooth navigation, throughout the design, and creative elements, make any website look genuine and often attract a higher rate of return on investments. Three-fourths of your project is the research and design while only a quarter equals programming.

The user experience needs to have a balance of blatant promotions and subtle clues. Since the customer today defines the market, it is compulsory of the web designer to understand the target audience to the nth degree. Any negligence in the research can lead to significant loss of time, energy and resources.

Be smart with the code. Instead of overwriting in an effort look clever, we suggest web developers to spend their time writing a simple, yet powerful code that works well for the audience and the company. In other words, your job as a web designer is to prioritize the customer through the lens of the client. Each line of your code must have a definite cause to be written. Unnecessary coding is an invitation to devastation. Hence we would reiterate the importance of brevity in the code for the umpteenth time.

Remember that progress is a process

The ideas always considered shippable are quite often the ones that lead to break downs. Letting a huge feature hold you back is like dreaming of an Apple watch before the development of the first computer. The use of Lean, Agile, Scrum and XP is a safe bet.

Since development is not an event but a process, there’s no harm in continuous trial and error. Incremental changes throughout the project would reduce the chances of major pitfalls. Hence we suggest our readers be practical and score singles, instead of wasting precious moments to hit the grand-slam of a home run!

Write to the present

It is only natural to try to predict the future trends of your market to succeed in the critical competition. However, that does not mean that the developer over engineers for an undetermined future trend. Disregarding the trends of today in favor of a futuristic possibility is like closing the bakery at lunchtime while hoping to make sales in the snow!

Depending too much on a hypothetical situation may leave a negative impact on your user interface which will inevitably worsen the user experience? Create backends that you can either fall back on or give yourself enough space to improve with the trends of the time. Leave sufficient flexibility in your web design so that you don’t necessarily have to do a complete overhaul; which is not only expensive but also tedious. We suggest our readers test the code that they create.

We believe that testing is a crucial element in the process of serious web development. Writing overcomplicated or illegible code is an error no professional should do. It is your responsibility as a creator to ensure that your code is updated and has undergone severe tests.

To conclude this article, remember to continue practicing and growing. The more you exercise your skills the likely you are to get better and improve your own mistakes. Your experience in the field of coding and creating will get you the insight no one shares. Keep reading, keep learning!

About the Author

Alma Causey is a Freelance writer by day and sports fan by night. She writes about tech education and health-related issues. Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover.

It’s no secret the tech field is dominated by men. Even though women now make up roughly 46 percent of the workforce, they only hold 24 percent of computer science jobs and about 11 percent of executive-level jobs in Silicon Valley. Of the women who do make it into Silicon Valley, they make 61 percent less than their male counterparts. That evens out to an average of over $16,000 less per year.

There is no direct reason for the gender discrepancy; however, speculation largely lends itself to the rise of the “male tech geniuses” like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs whose overpowering success overshadowed females in the field. Additionally, women are viewed as too emotional and face the problem of pregnancy bias that men do not.

When a man fails or makes a mistake at work, they are allowed the opportunity to explain themselves and fix their mistake. The same can not be said for women. When high-powered women make a mistake, they are met with a much higher level of scrutiny. Their failings are seen as a reason they shouldn’t lead rather than a simple misstep.

How do women actually stack up?

Although women are not as prevalent as men in the tech industry, that’s not due to lack of skill. On the contrary, female-powered companies have historically performed 3 times better and generated 12 percent higher revenue than those led by men.

Furthermore, in a GitHub study, code written by women was actually accepted 4 percent more often than code written by men. The catch? The coder’s genders were not disclosed prior to the acceptance of their code. Women in the study were in fact, better coders, but only when the judges were unaware they were women.

What is the effect on women?

The turnover rate is more than twice as high for women as it is for men. 41 percent of Women in tech are leaving their jobs as opposed to 17 percent of men. Of those women, 56 percent leave in the middle of their careers; 24 percent of whom leave the tech field completely, 20 percent leave the workforce altogether.

Why? Most often it’s because 30 percent of women over 35 still hold junior level positions while they see their male colleagues moving up around them. Rather than stay in unfulfilling jobs they will never advance in, women choose to leave in search of fulfillment elsewhere.

What are companies doing for women in tech?

Diversity initiatives

Many companies are dedicating time and money to work on diversity initiatives. Though only the companies who are truly diverse tend to be the ones who report, they’ve proven organizations with a more diverse workforce perform better. But that’s not all. High-diversity businesses also have more satisfied workers and a leg up on the competition.

Pinterest has one of the most diverse executive teams at the moment; however that number is only about 8 percent. Google also has higher numbers than the national average with a 30 percent female workforce but that number is still much lower than men. Tech companies are putting in the effort to catch up, but still, have a long way to go in diversifying their teams.

Reducing pregnancy bias

Pregnancy, maternity leave, and motherhood seem to be the largest biases against females in the workforce, especially in the tech industry. The United States is one of the only countries that does not require paid parental leave for businesses. As a result, many women are forced to choose between their careers and their children and leave the workforce. Some companies though, are making a point of actively combatting that.

For example, Netflix provides unlimited paid parental leave for a year following childbirth or adoption. Tech giants Google and YouTube give new mothers 18 weeks of paid leave while also give families $500 to invest in the stock market for their children.

Women still only account for about a quarter of the workforce in the tech field and are often overlooked. However, they have proven to be just as successful as, if not more successful than, their male counterparts. Though the tech industry has a long way to go before bridging the gender gap, they are slowly adapting practices to get there.

 

A big thanks to Amanda Peterson, to writing and submitting this piece to us.