Matt Cutts Explains How Google Assesses the Quality of Content with Few Inbound Links

In a video posted today on the Google Webmasters YouTube page, Matt Cutts addressed how Google would determine the status of a page’s content should it contain few, if any, links. Ashish from India asked: “How does Google determine quality content if there aren’t a lot of links to a post?”

Cutts explained that in such instances, determining quality would mean reverting back to the days before search engines used links as a ranking signal. “You’re pretty much judging based on the text on the page,” stated Cutts. “The first time we see a word on the page, [we] count it a little bit more; the next time, a little more but not a ton more. After a while we say ‘We’ve seen this word. Maybe this page is about this topic.’”

However, Cutts cautioned against needlessly repeating keywords, as too many repetitions of keywords might be considered keyword stuffing by Google, which in turn would negatively impact the web page’s rankings. Google’s webmaster guidelines advise webmasters to “focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”

Reputable domains are another factor that Google considers when attempting to determine the quality of a site’s content. Another means of ranking well on Google’s search results—even without a lot of inbound links—is to create content for relatively obscure topics. If a searcher types a rare phrase, and a particular web page has that rare phrase, Google might return that page because it could be relevant and topical for the searcher.

Cutts admits that assessing content quality on sites with few links can be challenging, and Google would have to resort to assessing the quality of the sites’ textual content. Cutts’ latest video demonstrates how important inbound links have become to Google’s ranking and quality algorithms.

More than 200 signals—including an analysis of the sites’ content and the quality of its backlinks—are applied to users’ queries in order to return the most relevant results to those users. Relevant, quality inbound links that are freely given as an editorial choice by external sites can positively affect a site’s rankings on PageRank.

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