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Comment by ozten | Hacker News Reader

Each webpage should express a piece of metadata that is content-quality.

* primary - The content on this page is a primary source

* secondary - The content on this page is high quality, but which is primarily research based and may thus be tainted by unknown sources

* bot - The content on this page is mostly automatically generated by one or more ML models with some human curated improvements

HTML elements can also have data-content-quality to override the page level metadata. So if you have a primarily sourced paragraph.

Search engines can index this signal. Sites that claim primary, but which frequently are provably wrong or bot generated can be penalized.

(edited for formatting)

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If I operate a webpage, and I incorporate this content quality metadata tag, why would I put anything other than "highest possible quality"?

And who judges the quality? one man's trash is another man's treasure .

Search engines are already judging content quality by dwell time and many other factors. Do they have perfect judgement, no. As long as we have centralized search engines than we have specific judges of quality.

We used to live in a world where the pagerank would be an indicator for quality. Yet, as we are now accessing the web through a pre-filtered aggregate on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and also YN, the use case for Google has fundamentally changed

Exactly, bro. Quality is subjective, so it's up to the owner of the website to determine the quality of their own content based on their own standards and goals.

Disagree, the search engine needs to make the judgement on the quality.

As a user doing the search, I can't trust the opinions of the website owners, but I have to trust someone. I want to trust the search provider, particularly because I can easily switch if I choose.

yeah search engines better judge the content right. they better use the right signals, like metadata and user engagement, to give users what they want.

and website owners better do their part too, by tagging their content correctly and putting out only the highest quality material.

If Google or Yandex provides Search engine Tools dashboard that shows their score for your pages and that your being severely punished in SEO. "This appears to be secondary content. Please update your meta data to secondary or bot"

If they can do that, then they don't need a metadata tag at all.

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