Know How Google Judges Your Content: Botify’s Content Quality

16th March 2017Elizabeth

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.

Why is our Content Quality feature a major breakthrough in the SEO industry?

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:

• Number of words (Understanding where you have thin content)
• Level of similarity between pages (Revealing levels of duplication across your entire site)
• Full and near Content Duplication (Ability to pinpoint and eradicate all completely duplicate or near duplicate content quickly)

But Botify’s approach to Content Quality is unique in the following:

• As Google does, all template information is removed from each page and Content Quality analyses are only based on core HTML content
• To save time and evaluate specific site sections, you have access to Botify’s industry-leading Advanced Segmentation tools within the Content Quality feature
• All content changes are tracked and evaluated to see the rate of change

Without removing template content, Content Quality Analyses are irrelevant

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.

Which percent of your pages is Template and which is Unique Content?

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.

Evaluate Rich and Thin Content Site-Wide or at the URL 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.

How similar are the pages across your website?

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.

Analytics Integration with Content Quality Reveals the Direct Impact on Your Business

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.

Combine Botify’s Advanced Segmentation with Content Quality to easily see the poorly performing sections of your site

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.

With Botify’s Unlimited Crawling and Automated Scheduling, Track Content Quality Progress Over time

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’s Content Quality is the truest measure of how Google will judge your content

Botify Content Quality is the first tool to:

• Remove all content in templates before doing Duplicate or Similar Content Analyses,
• Detect thin content accurately by not counting text in templates
• Conduct analyses at the pagetypes level
• Introduce automatic content changes tracking at scale.

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?