Google crawls millions of pages and sites every day—they crawl your site, they crawl our sites, and they look at the quality and interaction of their users on our sites. Given that 80–90 percent of the USA’s web traffic comes through the Google search engine, it is very important to take into account what elements Google uses to determine the quality of a website.

How Google Search Works 

Google uses an algorithm, which has never been shared, so we have to look to their guidelines and statements for direction to determine quality. Using quality scores, and relevancy to search queries, Google determines how websites rank against the competition in their search results. Abiding by Google’s quality standards is always a wise decision if you want to rank well.

Quality is derived from signals that Google takes from your website, competing websites and how your site interacts with the rest of the web. The intent, from their point of view, is to ensure that users receive the most relevant search results  and rarely encounter irrelevant results or spam.  

When Google crawls your site, it picks up signals, which can boost your quality in their eyes, such as unique content, original photos and a logical and easy to navigate design for users of your website.

Why Links Matter

There are, however, signals outside of your website that can degrade the quality of your website. One of the strongest signals is your link profile, which is literally all of the pages on the web that link to your website.

A link works as a recommendation of sorts from one website to another. The owner of the linking website is recommending your services and product. A great, positive signal to Google is having reputable and non-spammy websites (which means, valuable, useful and a clear service for users. For more reading please see Google’s SEO rules) linking to your site. On the other hand, if the sites linking to your site are spammy, this can be a negative signal that your website is also spammy. This most likely results in missing out on a lot of potential traffic and leads!

Death by Penguin

In 2012 and 2013, Google released the much needed Penguin update. The update tightened the rules around spammy websites and those engaged in the practices of buying links (never, under any circumstance, do this) and setting up their own link networks (creating artificial signals to fool Google).

Penguin placed manual and algorithmic penalties (which can lower rankings, thus minimal traffic, or even have your site de-indexed, meaning it wouldn’t show up on the search engine at all.) on spammers, as well as many normal companies, which had poor link profiles. That is to say, many spammers linked to normal companies, which caused them to look as if they were part of the spam networks and would be treated accordingly. If you haven’t clean up your link profile in the last year, you may be experiencing lower than normal traffic and rankings because of these changes.

Penalties, whether manual (you’ll know via your search console) or algorithmic, are no joke and will absolutely devastate the traffic coming to your website. Here is an example of a blog site which encountered an algorithmic penalty, note the huge drop in traffic  between April 22^nd and April 29^th:

We’re about to hit another Penguin update in 2015 so you need to be prepared! It’s time to clean up your link profile and boost the quality of your site. Learn how to get started in my next post: Performing a Link Audit.