Perhaps it's a "thin content" penalty.
Looking at the site, the posts have low wordcount. No images. Lots of links.
That's kind of consistent with the other trends we're seeing from Panda 4.0.
Thoughts?
Looking at the site, the posts have low wordcount. No images. Lots of links.
That's kind of consistent with the other trends we're seeing from Panda 4.0.
Thoughts?
The idea that pictures would improve things for metafilter is bizarre; it's a discussion site and the discussion is really deep on both MeFi proper and AskMe, which is where a lot of the search traffic went (very deep archives).
It's possible that people wouldn't "bounce" as much if there were lots of images, but it's not obvious that getting people to stay that way is a good thing. Google's algorithms shape the web, they don't just measure it, and I'd rather see more link-heavy, image-sparse pages.
If you answer everything in two sentences, Google is still likely to punish you for it even if those are ideal answers. They punish thin content even if it's supposedly great.
They have to constantly write edge case scenario algorithms because the overall of their search system is of very low 'intelligence.' They're whittling their way into a corner in the process, because they don't know any other way to deal with problems than to further narrow what's defined as the good with another specialty algorithm that someone inside Google hacks together to buy another day against spam winning.
The situation is: Google can't tell what's a good answer and what's not based on the content. They have to try to figure out what's good or bad based on every other measurement except the actual content. So if the ideal answer is a mere 47 words long, Google is too stupid to know the difference and understand there are many instances where short & concise is better than seven pages of verbosity. In the not so distant future, this is going to be laughable.
My opinion might be scoffed at today, but I think Google's search platform is little more than state of the art junk that scales well. It's the best junk we have right now, and that's not saying much.
Killing Google search should be on PG's list of hard things that someone should be tackling. They're a dinosaur.
Until google fully develops AI to actually analyse content, it has to go on meta data about content to judge it. This can be length of content. This can be things like images.
If I were to define "good thick content" in a way that a robot could understand, I might look at the following variables:
- High wordcount, let's say maybe 1,000 words or more
- At least 1 relevant image on the page
- Bonus points if it's an original image (i.e. not a stock photo)
- High ratio of words to links out
- Lots of social shares
Going with that profile, it's possible that ask.com etc. were the intended targets and Metafilter was collateral damage.
This is all speculation so take it with a grain of salt.
How would you figure out relevance algorithmically?
Reverse image search is probably too expensive to do this for every image found on the web, but Google could surely do this for a subset. Then they could match alt attributes: If two sites use the same image, and one has an alt attribute of "automobile" and the other "car in street" you can ask Bayes how likely it is that these two sites both made fake alt text that does not describe the image.
Basically if Google Images can show you images relevant to your search term, then Google Search can find out if an image is relevant to a topic in much the same way.
Directly: It adds rich content to your posts (video's, audio, images). It adds keywords in the image alt attribute and image description. Good images will increase your ranking on Google Images.
Indirectly: If the images contribute to the topic/post (not merely decorative), then you get more user satisfaction, which will increase repeat visits, word-of-mouth and links.
Do the all-things-equal test: Two pages on the same topic (let's say 'Bonobo Monkey'), but one has a picture of the topic. Which one would you find more useful? Two pages of equal quality, yet one has a picture of the author with rich markup next to it, which one would you find more credible?
As with all things, don't overdo it, or use it to manipulate: Adding images when they don't make sense for the topic, copying all your images from elsewhere, spamming the alt attribute with keywords, put a page full with unrelated images etc. Basically do not treat it as an SEO technique, treat it as enhancing your content with media to increase overall quality and user satisfaction.