Elizabeth
When we started thinking about adding Content Quality evaluation in Botify Analytics, we were convinced that no SEO tool was offering a perfect answer to this well-known SEO challenge. Rather than develop our own metric, we thought, how does Google approach this problem?
We spent a lot of time understanding Google’s approach, building out the methodology, beta testing across billions of web pages, and we’re proud to announce that the new Botify Content Quality feature is now available to all customers as a standard feature.
Content Quality Analysis provides all the standard information SEOs have come to expect when it comes to technical analysis of content and how it impacts your organic results:
But Botify’s approach to Content Quality is unique in the following:
It’s common that a majority of a page’s content is found in the template(s) used by the website. That is, in the menus, sidebars, footers, etc. of your page or in boilerplate text that appears across many pages. This content is often ignored or devalued by search engines, since it doesn’t help them understand which keywords, phrases, and topics the page is referencing.
The focus in our Content Quality feature, then, is on the non-templated content – how much of it is there, how unique it is, and does it match anything for which people are searching.
Botify’s Content Quality Analysis is powerful because it first analyzes the HTML for templated content and then does a second evaluation that ignores that templated content to focus on the text that search engines are most likely to use for indexing. Without being able to separate the template content as Google does, real content quality analysis is impossible.
Since the first step of the process is identifying the amount of templated content, Botify calculates the share of template vs. content at the most granular URL level, which enables it to be aggregated at the segment or site-wide level.
Botify’s Content Quality feature allows you to quickly see what part of your site is likely to drive traffic with rich content and what part is low value with thin content. Longer content is more likely to have the topical depth needed to drive long-tail traffic. Use word count as a dimension on which to analyze your content performance and improve thin content.
Assess the degree of similarity between pages to weed out content overlaps. Filter and segment your data to evaluate the impact of too-similar content – like near-duplicates and similar or related content – is having on organic performance.
In the above, you can see that there is very little completely duplicated content. But there is still an effect on traffic by having highly similar pages. In the table below, we see that active pages with higher similarity scores have fewer visits per page.
It’s often useful to view content similarity or duplication through the lense of pagetypes or topical segments to identify the greatest opportunities for improvement. For this publisher, the charts pagetype has the greatest share of duplicate content while the editorial has a range that can be analyzed in more depth.
Keep an eye on the evolution of your content over time to monitor changes to content indicators like length and uniqueness across all segments of your website. How does keeping your content fresh impact organic search performance? Are your pages being penalized for content changing too frequently? Are stale pages negatively affecting SEO?
Botify Content Quality is the first tool to:
We’re proud to provide Content Quality to all new users and new projects as a built-in part of Botify Analytics! Hope you’re going to love it.
What does Google think about your Content Quality?
