Updated:
by Wayne Smith
Content should be written primarily for human users, but webmasters should also consider search engines as important intermediaries for reaching their audience.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines outline key considerations for avoiding search engine pain points. By aligning with these guidelines, you can create an evergreen or low-risk SEO strategy that reduces the risks associated with competitor tactics.
Depreciation
If updates are not made, content on social media and search engines can and often does decline in visibility and effectiveness. Even link equity is subject to deterioration over time.
Duplicate content is a pain point.
Duplicate content, syndicated content, soft 404 pages, and keyword cannibalization pose risks to SEO if not properly addressed. Pages with identical or low-value material provide little benefit to search engines or users, potentially harming rankings and user experience.
The option provided to the search engine is to select the best, AKA the first result, and remove or penalize the results that don't add value.
Duplicate content should be removed by using either or both robots.txt or the canonical tag.
Syndicated content is harder because two or more sites controlled by different publishers are involved. The canonical should point to the original publisher. Google Search may ignore the canonical and use the most authoritative publisher, removing or lowering the lower-ranking page.
The site or content publisher needs to avoid keyword cannibalization. It does not benefit the client to have many similar pages on the site talking about the same topic. Every page should have a gain of information or significantly different materials to provide value both for clients and search engines.
The page with lower user engagement is likely to drop in rankings or be dropped for the keyword being cannibalized.
Soft 404 are pages created by the server that have no unique content. These pages should be no-indexed.
Google's Quality Raters Guidelines
The quality rater guidelines highlight several key issues that Google aims to address and uphold as standards for its search engine. Content should have a purpose, not be harmful, and is rated with a PQ based on how well the page achieves its purpose.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines: Overview
At Google, we like to say that Search is not a solved problem: We’re constantly making improvements to make Search work better for our users. We put all proposed improvements to our Search product through a rigorous evaluation process. This process includes soliciting feedback from “Search Quality Raters”, who help us measure how people are likely to experience our results.
Purpose of the page
A page can not have a purpose without having a topic or keyword, the purpose is based on the search intent for the keyword. A minimum level of on-page SEO, such as keyword research, the keyword in the title, and above the fold is required.
Thin Content Pain Point
When a user clicks from search to a site looking for information -- And the content on the page is nothing more than basic information -- the user is dissatisfied.
There is no clear-cut rule for a webmaster to use to measure how thin the content on a page is. No specific word count - although many webmasters self-impose the word count must be over 500 words.
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